


No Halo

by BlueMoonHound



Series: Lucretia [3]
Category: The Adventure Zone (Podcast)
Genre: Alcohol Abuse/Alcoholism, Angst, Angst and Hurt/Comfort, Crew as Family, Disordered Eating, F/F, F/M, Hurt/Comfort, M/M, Marijuana, Multi, Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder - PTSD, Wakes & Funerals, im not going to tag people who are just mentioned because they die, namely merle and magnus, pale taako and lucretia, unnaturally long lifespans
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-12-05
Updated: 2017-12-13
Packaged: 2019-02-10 20:27:31
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 7
Words: 20,122
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/12919635
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/BlueMoonHound/pseuds/BlueMoonHound
Summary: It's my birthday. I'm 100 years old today. I don't feel a day over sixty.I'm starting to wonder if the wonderland elves didn't take age from me at all. Counting them, I'm 120. Counting the century, I'm 220. I'm a little baffled by my own perceived longevity at this point.---Lucretia lives unexpectedly long.





	1. Happy Birthday

**Author's Note:**

> The kind of angst I never expected myself to write. Maybe this means my old scars are starting to heal.  
> As a note, I have most of this written. Hopefully I won't pull another "as fast as you can" on this fic. I know, six chapters seems like more than I've ever done (and successfully completed) and it is-- but the only thing I DON'T have written for this is a hypothetical and not too important epilouge, so hopefully it will be fine.  
> (note from after finishing work: I find it amusing that I called the epilouge unimportant and it turned out to be necessary.)
> 
> Btw -- my tumblr is [ Bluemoonhound!](http://www.bluemoonhound.tumblr.com/)

Cycle 99, year 75, journal 2

_It's my birthday. I'm 100 years old today. I don't feel a day over sixty._

_I'm starting to wonder if the wonderland elves didn't take age from me at all. Counting them, I'm 120. Counting the century, I'm 220. I'm a little baffled by my own perceived longevity at this point. I consulted my own books on time and necromantic magic, turning up nothing. I can't ask Magnus about this, since he is no longer with us, and I am still afraid to ask Barold after all I have put him through. The twins might know, since they are both elves and wizards themselves, but again, I am afraid to ask._

 

Lucretia sets down her pen, leans back in her chair, and presses on a visible vein in her hand, feeling it squish under her finger. Her body hasn't changed in 50 years. At first, she had figured she was a late bloomer. Her own time would come, she would die just like any human. But it had begun to get ridiculous. Magnus had passed almost ten years ago, and even on the ship he had been a year younger than her. She had never expected to be in the room at Magnus's deathbed. She had never expected to see Angus hit middle age, since he was half elven, and had more than double a human lifespan. The way things are turning out, she's frightened she might outlive Merle. Lucretia laughs, hysterical, and shuts her notebook. It's too early in the morning to think about this. It's too early in the morning and it's her birthday and maybe she should be celebrating? She had given herself an 100th birthday party 20 years ago, when she had hit 100 including the lich-elf aging bullshit, but she hadn't expected to live to her actual hundreth at the time, so she had figured that was justified.

She takes a deep breath and stands up, grabbing her coffee mug and downing the mouthful slowly cooling in the bottom. She heads to the kitchen and starts the coffee machine, taking a handful of pistachios on her way out. The sun is peering over the horizon. Not only is it her birthday, but it's morning, and she hasn't slept. Oh well, not everyone can replicate Davenport's perfect sleeping habits.

Her staff spent the night leaning against her bed. It was humming, softly; ever since the light had been reunited, it had stopped trying so hard to overpower her, but it still talked, it still comforted her, and it still sang. She's extremely thankful that she didn't have to give up the company of the staff when she had defeated the hunger, because that company had helped her through the worst seven years of her whole too-long life. She changes out of yesterday's outfit, quickly, into something more comfortable. She's still running the bureau, and yesterday had been meetings, meetings, meetings-- settling on what was proper compensation for a list of long-term effects of the IPRE's impact on the world. She doesn't feel like the right person to be deciding these things. If anything it should be a panel of all seven of them, but even that isn't an option anymore. The rest of the crew is busy, and even if they weren't, Magnus is dead.

Lucretia spends most of her morning filing paperwork, tidying her office, and drinking her third pot of coffee. An elf with some distant relatives in Phandalin had asked for 200,000 gold pieces in compensation for loss of life. It had taken some time to prove to them that their relatives had died before Phandalin was blown off the map, but she had managed. She slides those papers into a folder along with a plethora of other bogus requests from various folks far and wide. The longer she worked on this project, the more of those she received, and now they're almost more common than real concerns. That being said, it is her punishment for her deeds, and as a result it's her job to handle each case with as much patience as she has within her.

As she's reviewing a report from Refuge, around noon, someone knocks on her door. Lucretia takes a deep breath, putting the papers back in order on her desk and standing up. She grabs her staff and heads towards the front door.

“HAPPY BIRTHDAY!!”

Lucretia starts, stepping back as quickly as she can and tripping over her own feet. Thank gods for the bulwark staff, she thinks, catching herself.

Lup is standing in the doorway, holding the most delicious looking cake Lucretia has ever seen and grinning ear to ear. Lucretia feigns dusting off her blouse and smiles as best she can with her heart jittering in her chest.

“Hello, Lup, fancy seeing you here. Come in.” She steps aside.

“How've ya been? Long time no see! You should come over more.” Lup bounces through the door, putting the cake down in the kitchen. Barry shuffles in a little after, looking uncomfortable.

“Uh- I've been fine, Lup. Still running the Bureau, you know how it is-- Been getting more scams than real requests by now, though.” She shuffles her feet and closes the door. “So what did you want to talk about?”

“uhm?” Lup turns around, stops fishing through Lucretia's cupboards for a food that isn't ramen noodle packets or wine. “What do you mean?”

“Well, even for me, a human, birthdays are not all that important, and I'm not exactly known for being ah, a well loved member of the crew, after what I've done. So I feel like there has to be something else going on here.”

“Creesh, it's your hundredth! I dont have to have a special reason to give you a cake on your hundredth birthday. Do humans even live to a hundred, most of the time?” She feigns thinking, then bounces onto her toes. “You're an _adult_ now.”

“No, we-” she pauses. “To be frank with you, I'm dumbfounded at how long I've been alive.”

“All the more reason to _celebrate_!!”

Barry had taken over looking through the cupboards while Lup talked, and half of them were hanging open by now, revealing their emptiness. “Lucretia, when was the last time you ate something besides ramen?” He opens another cabinet. “Ramen or… Pistachios? Don't you use those in your Pgorp thing?”

“Does it really matter?”

“Uh, yeah, I was kinda hoping we could have lunch.”

Lucretia sighs. “You come into my house on my hundredth birthday and try to demand I provide you with food.”

“We brought cake, it's like a potluck!” Lup says.

Hah. “I see, well, we could order takeout, if you'd like. I have a lot of paperwork to get back to. I got a letter from Refuge today.”

“You work too much.” lup sighs, reaching for the stone of farspeech sitting in the corner and tapping it with her wand. “You definitely don't need to work as much as you do.”

“It's a good distraction.”

“From what?” Barry starts shutting the cupboards.

“Just, a lot of things? I'm sure there are hobbies you use to distract yourself from life in general.”

“Usually I talk to my wife. Or my brother in law.”

Lucretia chuckles. “I don't have that luxury.”

Barry frowns.

Lup mutters something under her breath, and a young voice responds through the stone. Lup sounds cheerful as she talks to the delivery boy, almost amused while she works her way past the technicalities (I'm the most magical elf in the world, how do you THINK I got this frequency?) but her ears remain low, tips near her shoulders.

The silence while they wait for the pizza to arrive is heavier than the air even when Lucretia is alone. She would rather be back in the meetings from yesterday, scolding Avi for putting go-gurt in her drink (Director, that was ONE TIME!! Taako put me up to it, don't tell me I'm wrong--) or talking to Leon about something stupid from the century, because for some reason most memories from the century don't hurt. There are a few years. She didn't think, let alone talk, about those years.

Barry springs up to get the pizza as soon as it arrives, leaving Lucretia and Lup alone in the kitchen. Lucretia figures Lup told him something of their relationship on the Starblaster.

“Lucy, are you okay? You seem kinda out of it.”

“No worse than normal, I am a little hungry, but. I think you guessed that.”

“No, like, Luce. Aren't you glad you've lived so long?”

“No.”

“Oh.”

Barry returns with the pizza. Lup's ears spring up and she grins. “Hooboy! Pineapple!” She says pineapple like 'Minneapolis' and Barry laughs.

Lucretia nibbles on a slice from the cheese pizza and lets things unfold for a moment. Lup tries to shove a whole slice of pepperoni in Barry's mouth and he banishes it to the astral plane. Then lup turns to her.

“Got an adult name?”

“What?”

“When you turn 100, you get an adult name. You know. You're an honorary elf now, I've decreed it.”

“Oh, um.” Lucretia feigns thinking for a moment. (first of all, why would it matter? Her “adult elf” life would be painfully short compared to an actual elf's, because despite having gotten this far, she can't imagine she'll last much longer.) “hhhmmmm. Maybe, Lucretia? I like that name, it has Latin roots. It's, ah, _lucrative_.”

“I love it!” Lup claps her hands together. Barry doubles over next to her.

Lucretia considers for a moment the years she spent transmuting garbage into gold to pay her workers. Lucrative, indeed.

“So what have you two been up to?” Lucretia bites a second piece of pizza.

“oh, yanno, work – wait, have I told you the story about the cave lich?”

“Lup, it's been ten years since we've seen each other. I have no idea what you're talking about.”

“Fuuuuck, has it really been that long?”

“You bet.”

Lup slides forward on her chair. “Well, I love this story, so.”

Lucretia relaxes and lets Lup (and occasionally Barry) hash out the most interesting stories from the past ten years.

 

“Cake time!”

It's been a few hours, and Lucretia's starting to feel the heavy exhaustion of a few all-nighters in a row. (She may have dozed sitting up. She is a century old, after all.)

Lup doesn't bother with the formalities. She just cuts the cake, fetches some plates and forks, and plops a big piece down in front of Lucretia. She digs her fork into it, watching it spring apart and analyzing it the way she used to on the Starblaster. She puts the bite in her mouth and melts, because this is DEFINITELY Taako's creation. It tastes better than she remembers it being.

“This is fucking perfect.” She swallows. “Did Taako make this?”

“You betcha!” Lup says, mouth full.

“H- How did you convince him to cook for _me_?”

“I just asked him to?” Lup looks perplexed. “He was like, Okay. And he baked a cake. Why?”

“He hasn't talked to me since the day of story and song, Lup. I thought he was still harboring that grudge of his. I was ready for him to keep hating me till the day I die.”

Lup swallows. “I mean, he took his good ol' time, but it's also hard to get in contact with you when lock yourself away doing paperwork twenty-four-seven. When Killian and Karey died you just sorta took over all their work and, well. How many hours do you work a week? A hundred twenty-five? I wouldn't put it past you. You used to pull this shit on the Starblaster, too.”

Lucretia feels a little sheepish. “Sorry. I figured he'd find me when he was ready to deal with me. Maybe I don't know him as well as I thought.”

“Dunno, you know Taako pretty damn well. Not as well as I know Taako, of course. But. You're up there.”

“If you say so.”

She lets the topic drop.

The day ends too soon, and Lucretia, exhausted to the bone, finds herself ushering her old friends back out the door.

“Thank you for the wonderful evening. I can't guarantee that I'll be able to keep in touch, but I'll do my best.”

Lup shoots her fingerguns. “That's all I ask.” Then, just before stepping out of the house, she turns around and pecks Lucretia on the cheek.

She puts her hand on the spot and flushes. “G-Goodbye.”

“Byyyyeeee!!!” Lup skips after Barry.

Lucretia shuts the door and turns around, preoccupied.

well then.


	2. Little sister

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Good ol' fashioned pale as fuck fluff right here. This is where the Taako And Lucretia tag happens

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This one ended up having fewer scenes than I planned, which means this fic might have more chapters than I had planned...

 

Lucretia gets a message from Angus on her stone of farspeech one quiet afternoon, and when she picks up his voice is trembling.

“Madam director?”

“Good afternoon, Angus-- Are you alright?”

“I'm fine, Ma'am, I have some bad news. I'm sorry you had to hear this from me.” He takes a deep breath. “Mr. Highchurch died on Monday.”

“Merle?” Gods, Lucretia, you don't know another Mr. Highchurch, it has to be Merle. Her fingers are shaking a little bit, but she can't stop them. She feels a little far away. (She's human, she's 100 percent human, humans don't outlive dwarves, not even older dwarves! She's lived through 223 years, that's- a reasonable dwarven lifespan all on its own.) She takes a deep breath.

“Yes, Merle, Madam Lucretia are you alright?”

“Just Lucretia is fine- I-- I'm fine. How did he die?” Her voice cracks. She knows the answer. Old age.

“In his sleep. He's- He _was_ old- Oh,” Angus seems to realize something. “Oh, Lucretia--”

“I'm fine, I need a bit to process this, I'll call you back, okay?” Her entire body is tingling.

“Tell me if you need anything, okay?”

“I will,” she says, and then she hangs up. The stone of farspeech clatters from her fingers onto the desk. Lucretia counts. She's.. shes 123 years old. Hah, that's a funny number. She almost laughs. Almost.

She reaches from her journals. The early ones, from before the century, first. She reads them. She just sits down, and reads through every one, ignoring the sun when it tries to peer through her curtains, ignoring the darkness when it goes away. Had she make some pact, she didn't now remember? Had she done something stupid? She flips through journal after journal after journal, making her way through cycles, crying a little at 50 and again at 65. Nothing. Nothing. No pacts here! No promises whatsoever. She eats some pistachios. More coffee... Black spots develop in her vision and she does her best to blink them away. She reaches cycle 99. This one she can remember. No liches, no necromancy, of course no necromancy, she's an abjuration wizard! (An abjuration wizard who's done her fair share of transmutation, conjuration, and evocation in her time.) She hugs the bulwark staff close for a moment, dizzy. What could have caused this? What had she done wrong this time?

The world doesn't stop spinning, though, and her eyes feel too heavy, and she puts her head down on the notebook she has open and hopes that she'll just die already.

 

Someone's shaking her shoulder. Lucretia groans.

“Lucy, wake the fuck up!”

“No.”

“Also fuck you for hanging up on Ango and disappearing for TWO WEEKS. We thought you had died! What the fuck is wrong with you, Creesh? Are you okay?”

“I wish.” The person had stopped shaking her. She wanted to fall asleep again, everything felt hazy and foggy and wrong.

“Lucretia, get up, I'm making you pancakes. I'm gonna wager you haven't EATEN in two weeks, either.”

“Can't survive two weeks without food, m'human,” she mutters, but she forces herself to sit up anyway, blinking bits of fuzz out of her vision. They don't go away. “Pistachios,” she adds.

A livid Taako glares back at her from behind a wall of fog. “Fuck that, that's not food.”

Lucretia pushes herself to her feet, blinking again. She leans on her staff, but stumbles anyway as the world pitches around her. Taako grabs her shoulder, steadying her a little. “Gods, Lucy, what happened?”

She doesn't answer.

Taako helps her to the kitchen and sits her down at a seat on the island, digging around in her cupboards (much like she recalls Barry and Lup doing). He finds a bag of flour in the bottom corner of the bottom shelf, and after giving it a sniff, decides it's okay to use. He treks out of the room and returns with a box full of baking supplies.

She remembers going to the grocery store at some point… Good gracious, has it really been 23 years since she last talked to anyone from the IPRE? Avi kept nudging her to hit up Merle but she'd never gotten around to it. Gods… Merle. She's been so busy. She's been keeping herself so busy that her friend just _died_ while she wasn't paying enough attention. She'd stopped chronicling every year in a journal a while ago. There were just too many journals and too many years and she started having panic attacks every time she opened a new one because fuck, another year has passed and nothing has happened and _I don't know what to say_.

Lucretia puts her head down on the island, remembering what she did before she passed out. She feels like a fool, now; if she had ever made a life-extending pact, or ever performed any kind of necromancy, Barry, Lup, and Kravitz would be on her case. As it is, it felt like everyone who didn't literally work for her went out of their way to talk to her as little as possible.

Or she went out of her way to talk to them as little as possible. Think about them as little as possible. Exist in their lives as little as she could. Lucretia feels like an ignorant fool. She used to do that, but back on the ship she was a fresh-faced 20 something who was shy even around friends. Right up until cycle 65, no one knew anything about her till it slapped her- and them- in the face. (Or she got drunk.) And then she started telling them. She had stopped playing keep away with her emotions. Old habits die hard, though.

“So how've ya been?” Taako whips something into his batter, leaning against the counter.

“Busy,” Lucretia rasps.

“Lucy, you-” He pauses, eyebrows knitting together. “You vanished for two weeks. Puff. Not even the bureau has seen you for two weeks. The bureau didn't even question it either. Avi said this is _normal_. What the _fuck_ , Lucy? I, well, I thought-” He chokes on his breath, like he's going to cry. “I thought you snuffed it. I-- We-- thought you'd finally died. I'm…” A deep breath. “I'm scared, Lucretia. We're the last ones, 'cept dav, but hes like, the captain. And you're- you're human, you're gonna go soon too, right? Cause humans don't live so long.”

He's crying, there's tears running down his face. Lucretia feels like shit. He grimaces, wiping them away and turning back to the stove.

“Taako.”

“Yeah?” He pours batter into the pan.

“I'm scared.”

“Of dying? Luv, dyin's like, super chill. Like the chillest.”

“No. Exactly not. Taako, I've lived nearly two human lifespans by now.”

“Lucretia, you don't look a day over six-hundred.”

She laughs. “Taako, I don't- what if I outlive you?” She hiccups.

Taako flips a fresh pancake onto her plate. “Syrup? Whipped cream? Whatcha got, like a demon curse or something?”

“I think I'd know, Kravitz, Barry...” She doesn't finish her statement, putting a piece of pancake in her mouth. Fuck she's hungry.

“Whoa, don't go too fast, you haven't eaten in two weeks.”

“Shut up, Taako,” she mutters through a mouthful of sweet dough. “ _Pistachios_.”

“You want pistachios on your pancakes?”

“Fuck you.”

“He asked us to play Chesney songs at his funeral,” Taako says. “Are you coming to that?” He pours another pancake's worth of batter into the pan. “I miss him already.”

Lucretia puts her fork down. The funeral. Right. _Because people die, Lucretia, people die and you- You! A human! A pure blooded human! Somehow leave them behind._ She grips the edge of the table but it doesn't help. Her hands are shaking too much now, her stomach doing kickflips. She takes a breath, and another, but her fingers are tingling and her head hurts and she's too tired to stop this one. She can't get a real breath in anymore and suddenly Taako is on the other side of the island, saying something she can't quite comprehend and rubbing her shoulders, and she leans into the touch. In this moment, all context aside, it feels like she's back on the ship again, in the kitchen with Taako at three in the morning on a bad day after a bad year. She turns around in her chair and pulls him into a hug. She feels his ears relax against her face.

“Can we have hot chocolate? And grilled cheese? Like we did on the ship?” She hiccups, and manages to take a deep breath. She reminds herself of the year that they discovered grilled cheese. She ate grilled cheese for a whole week. She remembers arriving in cycle 99 and feeling shitty because grilled cheese didn't exist there yet. (Making her own cheddar on the moon base. Rolling her own dough. The only things she really _knew_ how to cook, without Taako.)

“I'll have to go shopping, Creesh. Your house is absolutely devoid of the good kush.”

“I'll go with you.” She pushes herself off the stool and steadies herself on the Bulwark staff.

“Are you sure? You're… I hate to say it, bub, but you're weak right now.”

“I need to get out of the house. I don't actually remember the last time I left.” She takes an experimental step, and trembles. “Should probably drink something first, though.”

Taako gets her a glass of water. She sits back down and sips at it. She eats a little more of the pancake, too. “What time is it?”

“One in the morning. Fantasy Costco is usually open, though, we can get what we need there.”

“What made you decide to turn up at my house at one in the morning?” Lucretia laughs.

“Chaboy doesn't have a schedule.” He poses against the island, grinning. There's something sad behind the smile, accentuated by the tear stains on his face.

She smiles into her water. She missed him.

 

The Costco is mostly empty, Garfield snoozing at the register, lights bright overhead. Lucretia takes a slow breath. It was almost good to be back in this weird place. Taako walks ahead, a little too briskly for Lucretia in her current state, so she spends some time examining the shelves. She could get more pistachios, or more ramen, or both. She's considering this in the soup aisle when Taako struts back over holding a basket full of chocolate, milk, cheese, bread, and a few other things she can't quite make out because Taako swoops her over his shoulder and walks towards the cash register. Lucretia makes an undignified noise and catches the Bulwark staff before she can drop it.

“Wh- Taako!”

“No ramen for you, Creesh, I knew what you were up to. It's real food time.”

“But--”

“Nope! Nope, I'm hanging around, honey, cause obvi you need more Taako time.” He puts the basket down in front of Garfield, who had woken up at some point.

Lucretia goes quiet. It occurs to her that last time she was in the same space as Taako, he had avoided her like the plague. He hadn't even talked to her. What happened to persuade him that she was worth hanging around again? She remembers her conversation with Lup 23 years ago, but it doesn't explain _this_. This feels like her relationship with Taako before they broke out of the endless planar loop. They were much closer friends, back then, but all the things she had done over the past fifty years still happened, despite the passage of time. In Lucretia's experience, wounds like that heal, but the scars don't go away. Taako starts heading out of the store. She watches the ground pass under his feet.

“Oof babe, you think you can walk on your own feet for a bit? Taako's flagging.”

“Yeees??” Lucretia says, because of course she can, he didn't pick her up because she was about to fall over or anything – but when he puts her feet on the ground she nearly sits down, world spinning. _Staff, staff_... It's upside down, but she's got some practice with it, and rights things real quick. (thank _every_ god for the bulwark staff, whether it's talking or not. This fucking staff. Holy shit. Where would she be without the goddamn staff?)

“Whoa, don't hit me!” Taako puts his hands up.

“Oh, right, sorry.”

They head back to her house in silence.

 

Lucretia puts her head on the table again, staring at one arm. It sags a little, just enough to make her feel old, but not _enough._ It's like, a fifty year old human arm. She's way older than that and it kinda sucks because she doesn't FEEL that old. Her body is wrong.

She turns her gaze to Taako. His ears flick, facing forward, absorbed in the pot of hot chocolate and the pan full of grilled cheese. It sizzles pleasantly.

“Why are you okay with this?”

His ears flick around, facing behind, down-- it would be a little disconcerting, if she hadn't seen Taako in this exact same position on the Starblaster a billion and a half times. It's a powerfully nonhuman action. “With what, bubellah?”

“With being around me, it's… well, it's been years, Taako, last time I saw you, you ignored me.”

He flips the grilled cheese. The quiet grows heavier and heavier.

“Lucretia?”

“Yes?” She sits up.

“I forgive you. You did a lot wrong, and you made a lot of bad choices and a lot of mistakes but, it's been a while and you've spent that whole time trying to fix it. I forgive ya.”

He flips the other grilled cheese.

Lucretia's chest feels tight, her head throbbing like she should cry, but she's not sure she has it in her anymore. She sips some water. Where did all her self control go? She used to hold off breakdowns for hours, _days_. Today has been a shitfest.

“Merle would have wanted that,” Taako says, his tone contemplative.

Lucretia fights against the sensation of unraveling at the seams. “Can we not talk about that right now.” She sips her water again. Okay, maybe she's capable of crying.

“Lucy, the grilled cheese is done,” Taako mumbles, and yeah, he's crying too, she can tell. He's not bursting apart at the seams( _maybe he is and you just can't see it, Lucretia. Taako is the expert_ ), but at least he was expecting this, before – he knew he would outlive Merle. He knew it was coming, and he knew he would live through it and come out the other side. She wonders how many people Taako watched die before he even reached elven adulthood. She nibbles her grilled cheese. He slides a hot cocoa across the table towards her, too.

It's good, though, she missed this. She missed this with more energy than she even has. She misses _everyone_.

 

“Will you stay the night?”

Taako turns away from the sink, where he was doing the dishes. “That was the plan, do you want me to?”

“Yes.”

He hums.

“I uh, I don't have a spare bedroom. You can sleep on the couch if you want, or, I can sleep on the couch if you --”

“Can I sleep with you?”

“What?” Lucretia feels shaken by the suggestion. (Like all the times she fell asleep in the kitchen with her head on her books and woke up in her own bed with an elf curled around her? She remembers all the times the twins would call her 'little sis' like they meant it. Lucretia is an only child.) “Like, in my room, or in my bed?”

“Only-” He pauses. “Whatever you're comfortable with. I just. I don't like being alone. I don't want to leave you alone.”

“I-I understand.” _I'm never alone_ , she thinks. _The staff is always there_. That's, probably neurotic of her. The staff isn't a person and it never has been. “I'm going to take a shower.”

He laughs. “That's a good idea, you smell like shit, Creesh.”

She chuckles too, then turns to leave the room.

 

Taako calls Kravitz and tells him what's going on. He then wastes a spell slot changing his clothes into something more comfortable. Lucretia puts on her softest outfit (pajamas she hasn't touched in at least a year, maybe more, time is irrelevant to her at this point).

He plops down on her bed like it's his own and pats the spot next to him. Lucretia leans her staff against the far wall and lies down, more gingerly than Taako had.

Taako pets her hair, and she realizes it's a lot longer than she's used to keeping it. A little memory of Taako braiding her hair on the ship comes back, or the time when she was really sick and he and lup took turns resting her head on their laps, reading her stories while she shivered. She sighs against his thigh.

For the first time in half a century Lucretia sleeps without her staff.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> _Just last week, I slept eight hours total, I barely sleep._   
>  _Maybe that's why I've been weak--_   
>  _the same things that plagued you still plaguing me._   
>  _And god called you to fulfill a vacant seat I tried to see why it wasn't me..._


	3. Funeral

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> A lazy morning. A last farewell to an old friend. Pan gives Lucretia some wine. A plea for understanding.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I keep editing the tags so they're shorter and fit the story better. Sorry if that's confusing. I don't think I need to add more characters, for example, so I removed "more characters later" from the other tags list.

She wakes up to the sun filtering through the windows for the first time in years. Lucretia blinks at the first thing in front of her. (A hand. Her hand.) She wiggles her fingers, letting consciousness sift into her like the light through the window, wan and delicate. She can't remember the last time she even woke up in her bedroom.

She panics when she realizes she doesn't have her staff, because FUCK, but the moment passes as she sees it leaning against a wall and springs up to get it, nearly falling over in the process. With the staff back in her hand, she relaxes enough to extend her senses beyond the immediate vicinity.

Someone is singing in the kitchen. They have a reedy, familiar voice. It's joined by a second voice, one more obviously trained. That's- That's Davenport.

She has concerns. It's been a long time. Her hands tremble, and she considers the window. The curtains may be parted, but the window itself is closed. The screen is in. She is, of course, among the most powerful wizards in existence, and despite feeling shaky and underfed, she knows she is no match for a window. (Could she do that _quietly_ , though.)

Lucretia shakes herself. Silly. Escape isn't an option, or a sensible choice. She can potentially watch everyone she's ever known die around her without resolving their feuds, or she can go out and try to settle those feuds while they both have their feet in the prime material plane.

She almost giggles hysterically at the thought of outliving people like Davenport and Taako. Gnomes live as long as 500 years, elves as long as 800 years, humans as long as 120 years. She's outlived hers, the other two aren't even close-- both of them around 200 years old, and Davenport even younger than Taako. (Mostly, she would assume, because gnomish age of adulthood is a full half-century before elven age of adulthood. Elves don't, in all consideration, live that much longer than gnomes. Gnomes are just more sensible about when their children get to be free of their households.)

With a flick of her staff, Lucretia gathers some clothes and pulls herself together, brushing her hair back and pulling it into a poofy ponytail on top of her head. Her long white robe, mid length skirt and blouse ensemble only mimics the Director look she had held while running the Bureau of Balance, before the day of story and song. _Mimics_. It's pointedly not the same, especially with her hair grown out so long. She gathers her wits.

Lucretia pushes her door open.

 

The first thing Lucretia notices, stepping into the living room, is that all the windows are open. She never opens the windows. It does provide a nice breeze, though. It's more comfortable than the cloying, stagnated air she had grown used to. She breathes in the scent of wildflowers.

She heads towards the kitchen.

The boys (She scolds herself for thinking of them as children, they're both older than her) are harmonizing in the kitchen, while Taako puts chocolate chips on the top of muffins. He doesn't move to look or stop what he's doing when she enters the room, but his ears twitch and a little smile appears at the corner of his mouth. The song ends, and finally he turns to look at her.

“Morning, Lucy.”

Davenport turns his head. He's sitting at the island, about where Lucretia had been the other day. He looks solemn, but not angry.

“Lucretia. You haven't aged a day.”

“Hello, Captain.” He looks a little worried. He's older now, healthier- despite the natural passing of time, he reminds her more of pre-journey than of post-journey Davenport today. There's a vibrancy to him that had vanished on the Starblaster.

“How are things with you? How's your ship? I'm sorry I've been a bit out of contact, I get too focused on my work sometimes, and I forget about the rest of the world.”

“Things are fine, it's been an awfully long time--”

“Dav, Dav, tell her about the time that a baby dragonborn got himself in the sails, that one's funny.”

“Everyone's heard that story, Taako.”

“Creesha hasn't. She's been cooped up in this place for fifty years. I talked to her for the first time in like fifty years yesterday, Dav, the only people she ever sees are members of the Bureau.”

Lucretia sits down at the island next to Davenport. “Yes, uh, sorry about that.”

One of the few advantages of self-isolation, she supposes, is the stories your friends have when you come out of your shell.

Taako pops the muffins in the oven. He wipes down the counter and pulls out a very large knife and some fruit.

“Alright, well, I was at sea, in the very middle of the fucking ocean, and a five year old dragonborn got themself into my sails somehow...”

Davenport tells some stories. Taako makes a fruit salad and serves it with the muffins for breakfast. The morning remains calmer than any morning Lucretia has seen in decades. It's winding to a close when Lucretia pours herself a third cup of coffee and Taako brings up a heavy subject.

“You gonna go to the funeral, Luce?”

“Oh, ah, of course.” She can feel the mood settle around her like the Hunger enveloping a plane. It doesn't hurt like the hunger did, though, when it slides into her chest and settles there. It's just sticky and cloying and uncomfortable.

She swallows a mouthful of coffee to diffuse the conversation as best she can.

“Hey lucy?” Taako looks solemn.

“Yes?”

“It's gonna be okay, you know that, right? It's not like you're immortal. That's against the rules.”

“Yeah-” She clears her throat. “Yeah, my imagination just gets carried away sometimes.”

She notices something glint on his fingers. “Taako, is that an engagement ring?”

“No, doofus, its my wedding ring. I'm surprised you didn't notice that sooner, we've been hanging out for like two whole days. You notice like _everything_.”

“Has it really been two days?” Lucretia mutters, more to herself. She folds her hands on the table. “Let me put something in context for you. When I write with my left hand, people who have known me for thirty years turn around and say 'you're left handed???!?!'. When I write with my right hand, the same people turn around and go 'I thought you were left handed!!'. Essentially, what I'm saying is people aren't made of infinite sentient processing nodes or whatever. No, I didn't notice your wedding ring. I haven't seen you in thirty years, Taako. Congratulations.”

 _what the fuck is wrong with you? Why did you snap like that? Taako doesn't mean anything by it._ Lucretia recalls a moment when Taako compared eating lunch to meeting redrobes. She chews on the inside of her lip, tearing at her skin.

“Wow I just got schoooooooled.” Taako laughs. “Yeah. Lup got angry at me when I didn't invite you. I kinda regret that now.”

“I hate to cut things short,” Davenport says, “But I need to get back to organizing affairs. Thank you for dragging me over here, Taako, and, well it was good to see you, Lucretia.” The look on his face doesn't say ' _good to see you_ '. It doesn't say ' _I hate you_ ', either, but she gets the feeling _trust_ isn't a thing she's going to regain with time and patience alone. Not from Davenport. She respects that. She took everything from Taako, but somehow she managed to take more from her captain.

“Well, we'll see you at the funeral, I suppose,” Lucretia says softly.

“Yes,” he agrees, and with that, he leaves the room.

 

 

A smaller ceremony had been arranged for those who knew Merle well, a few weeks before the public one, since, like all seven of the IPRE members, Merle was incredibly famous for helping save the world, and his family and close friends wanted to have a moment away from all that. Lucretia was almost surprised to find herself invited.

Lucretia feels out of place at the funeral home. People who knew Merle but weren't members of the IPRE keep looking at her with awe or surprise or a mixture of the two. Mavis and Mookie seem especially uncomfortable in her presence. She fights to keep her emotions in check, because her Director hindbrain keeps screaming at her that _you're in public, pull yourself together._

She's not sure what she was expecting, but Merle doesn't look that different in death. He does look older than she's ever seen him, but not any less _himself_. Maybe it's because she's seen him die so many times before. It doesn't feel wrong or unnatural to see him lying in a casket, but it does- for a moment -feel like she's back on the ship.

Lucretia has to stop herself when she feels herself slipping into defense mode, spider senses tingling, because what if they come back and kill the rest of them too? Calm down, calm down, no one's here. She feels surrounded, trapped by the crowd.

She's not on the ship, no one was killed, and now she has to deal once again with old age as a concept and a threat to the group of people she relied on for a whole century.

She was probably the biggest threat to them, in the end, whether she saved the world or not.

She sits down on a bench in the back and lets people move past her. Listens as Taako cries his way through a little speech about Merle. Her emotions swirl in a bubble in her chest. The ceremony seems to end too fast.

 

She feels out of place again at the temple, this time because she's not a worshiper of Pan. For that matter, she's not much of a worshiper of any god, though she pays her rights to Istus and the Raven Queen from time to time, since they've given her and her friends so much leniency in matters of death and fate. She's not even sure what pannites feel about others participating in their ceremonies, so she just feels awkward the whole time. She follows Taako's lead, since he seems to know what he's doing.

It doesn't occur to her that Merle and Pan were literally in a relationship till Pan himself turns up at the temple in all his splendor to give a speech. Lucretia has to stop herself from laughing because frankly, this is all beyond ridiculous, she's losing inches of sanity every second of every day – what did she do to deserve such wacky, wonderful friends?

Instead of laughing, she ends up crying. Taako pats her back.

 

The wake is a crowded ordeal, full of faces and people Lucretia hasn't seen or met before intermingling and socializing with those she has. Taako's talking to a brown haired wood gnome near the coffee bar. She spies a group of dryads, two of which she recognizes to be Sloane and Hurley. Pan is now in the corporeal form of a smallish satyr, holding a cup of wine (there's no option to drink wine at this wake, as far as she can see) and watching the crowd. She heads in his direction.

“Lucretia!” Pan grins. It's a little disconcerting. “How's the greatest Abjurer in existence doing on this fine evening?”

“Hello. I'm fine. Are Istus and the Raven queen here by any chance?” _A god just described you as the greatest abjurer in all of existence. A god just described you as the--_

“Nah, this is a distinctly mortal event. I'm here because I dated the deceased. Besides, neither of them are as good at corporeal forms as I am. I have practice.” He winks, and Lucretia can't keep the discomfort she had already been feeling from creeping onto her face.

“Ah, alright.”

Pan puts a hand on her shoulder. “Lucretia, are you sure you're doing okay?”

“No, I'm not.” She says, with a sense of finality. “I'm a little lost, to be honest. I've lived an unnaturally long time.”

“Hm, well I'm afraid I can't help you with that one. Would you like some wine?”

“I would love some wine.”

Pan turns her coffee into wine. It's the best wine Lucretia's ever tasted. She bids him a good evening and slides back into the crowd.

Lucretia spies Kravitz along the wall, looking as uncomfortable as she feels. He raises an eyebrow when he spots the wine in her coffee mug.

“Pan gave me some,” she explains. “How are you?”

“Doing well,” Kravitz sighs. “I'm surprised I haven't seen you in the astral plane yet, what's holding you up?” He looks her up and down. “You haven't aged in years, have you?”

“I actually, don't know what's going on with that, thanks,” Lucretia says, miffed. “I would much rather be dead right now if I'm being totally honest with you.”

“Taako would be upset,” Kravitz says, quietly.

“Yes well, I don't have any plans to off myself, so that's alright.” She swallows a mouthful of wine and is overjoyed when her cup refills itself. Bless Pan. Bless every Pan in every system Pan has ever existed, but especially this Pan. She now has the option to get drunk if that's her desire and nobody can stop her. She doesn't plan on getting drunk, but the option, oh man. She loves having that option.

“How has …. life? … been for you, Kravitz?”

“It's actually been pretty great. Barry and Lup are interesting characters, and excellent business partners. Taako is more than I could have ever asked for.” He smiles at Taako, who is across the room talking with his sister.

“I heard you're married now. I'm very happy for you.”

“Thank you.”

 

Lucretia gets back to her office late that night and immediately reaches for her stone of farspeech. Clicking it on, she dials Taako.

“Hey- Who's this- Whatsup?”

“It's Lucretia, I have a favor to ask, if that's alright.”

“Hit me with it, babe.”

“Can you make me a mirror to the Ethereal plane?”

“Of course I can, I'm the greatest transmutation wizard ever! Why, though?”

“To talk to gods, of course.”

“Oh yes, of course.” Taako laughs. He sounds unsure. “shore, hon. I'll drop it off next time I stop by.”

“Thank you.”

She turns off her stone of farspeech and reaches behind her, drawing down a fresh, empty journal. Her fingers tremble for a minute, but she steels herself. _I'm not chronicling today. It's okay. It's alright._ She takes her best pen out of her pen holder and uncaps a bottle of ink to fill it. On the cover of the notebook, in her neatest, prettiest handwriting, she writes ' _To whom it may concern_ '.

She waits a moment for the ink to dry, then opens to the first page, and begins.

 

_To Istus and the Raven Queen._

_I am, of course, beyond anything else, thankful for everything you have given to me and those I love. I could never ask for more than what I already have. Life and fate are fragile and temperamental threads in the fabric of time, and the fact that I have already bent them, knowingly or not, gives me less right to ask for more from you._

_However, I am frightened. There's no easier or softer way to put this: I have been alive for too long now, and it's eating at me. I was not at all prepared to watch my friend Merle die, and I'm even less prepared to witness anyone else die. I do not know why or how I lived this long. Therefore, I have a question, and all I wish for is the answer to this question. All I want to know is why I'm still on this side of the veil._

_It cannot possibly be my habits. I'm a bit of an alcoholic, I forget to eat and sleep for days. Weeks of my life are lost in a haze of stress. I forget to exercise. There is nothing about my routine that says healthy, so here I am._

_If you do not have an answer, I do not mind. I know you are not the highest beings, nor do you have infinite control over the universe. But I ought to have less power than you. I am a mortal._

_Best wishes,_

_Lucretia._

 

She closes the notebook.

 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> _So I didn't show up to your funeral, but I showed up to your house._   
>  _And I didn't move a muscle, I was quiet as a mouse._   
>  _And I swore I saw you in there but I was looking at myself._


	4. Restless

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Lucretia is restless. Time passes. Avi and Leon are concerned. Taako steals some clothes. Marijuana is involved.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This one's a bit of a "calm before the storm" moment. Some stuff is resolved... or is it? The Real Angsty Death Shit will pick up in chapter 5.  
> Yes, they do smoke weed in this chapter. You have been warned.

_Public Service Announcement._

_Due to lack of legitimate requests for aid from citizens, the Bureau of Benevolance will be changing their mailing address. We will continue to be in operation as long as our services are helpful to Faerun, that is to say, indefinitely. However, we will not, at this time, be taking requests from these places excepting in person._

_Thank you for your continued support,_

_Madam Director_

 

She puts her paperwork away. All of it. She files it neatly onto her shelves, organizes, gets rid of extra sheets of paper to be recycled. She spends a year fixing her office, lining her top shelves with her journals from the Century, her bottom shelves with information she might need, a back cabinet with all the scams and prank letters she's gotten in the past fifty odd years. She puts her prayer journal right at eye level, and then changes her mind, sliding it into her desk. The mirror goes on top of it.

Angus visits a few times, bringing with him dogs or Taako's cooking or both (he has laugh lines. He's nearly as old looking as she is. It feels backwards, to her.) Davenport is back at sea. Taako is back at work. He calls her sometimes, about twice a month, and tells her about Kravitz and Lup and Paloma. She enjoys these calls thoroughly, but finds herself wanting. She misses the days on the starblaster when the seven of them would sit around, eating Taako's cooking, and enjoy each other's company. She misses Fischer.

In fact, Lucretia is itching with energy. Her body feels full and bursting with it. Her mind is running too fast all the time now, and she feels underworked. She spends extra hours filing reports. She picks back up her habit of writing down everything she does, albeit she's more vague. Units of time are now measured in weeks instead of days, and journals are taking longer to fill.

One dark night, Lucretia finds herself lying awake, wishing that she had never killed the hunger, because right here, right now, with all her friends dying around her, she feels so, so alone.

She even misses the sixty-fifth cycle, because there was something to do, something so, so important, something worthwhile to put her mind to every moment of every day. Something to fix, someone to fight off, _something_ to worry about. And there was _Fischer_. The goddamn jellyfish had been better company than her staff will ever be, no matter how much the staff has helped her through the past lifetime.

She gets up in the middle of the night and puts on pants and a loose shirt and goes for a long run. She heads into the forest without food or water, and gets herself lost. She revels in how dirty she feels, in the way her body pleads for her to find food and water. She gets sick at some point, and it feels strange, lying on the forest floor, too cold and too weak to move. It feels new to her. (it's happened before. Her brain swirls with fog. She died that year, in the woods and alone.) Panicking, she follows roadmarks back to her house, collapses in the warmth without even bothering to head to her bedroom, and sleeps on the couch. She makes herself hot cocoa. She eats pistachios. She longs for company, but doesn't dare find any.

A few days later she heads back to the bureau, cold and authoritative air restored, and she makes sure everything is in order. Of course it is. Everything is perfect. She has painfully little to do and she's aching from it.

 

Leon and Avi seem concerned, one afternoon, to find the director of the B. O. B. repairing her own roof without magic, her hands covered in tar and scratches, her hair tied back in a bun. She feels like she's back on the ship again, for a moment, and it's both exhilarating and frightening at the same time. She feels young. Her arms ache from exertion, and there's dirt on her robes. The staff thrums below her, radiating the kind of energy she needs to keep herself going.

Someone calls her title behind her. 

“Madam director, why are you on the roof?”

“It's Lucretia. Just call me Lucretia.”

“Uh.” Avi and Leon share a look.

Lucretia finds herself calculating their ages. Avi's an elf- he was a little older than Taako when the boys had joined the Bureau. He would live a while. He might outlive her. Leon, a gnome in his 400's, might not. (She needs to write another letter to the goddesses. Maybe they'll hear her this time. Maybe they'll care.)

Death frightens her. (Not her own death. Never her own death. She's just too weak to bring it on herself.)

Lucretia brushes some escaped curls out of her eyes and tucks them back into her bun.

Leon crosses his arms. “Lucretia, why are you on the fucking roof?”

“It was leaking.”

“That's when you _hire_ someone to fix it for you, not when you climb on the roof and fix it yourself, Director. Or, you know, use magic, since you're among the greatest wizards in the world. You're a veritable powerhouse. And you're _human_ and _old as shit_ for a human and you shouldn't be doing physical labor.”

“I… I missed working with my hands, and I know how to do this. I've done it before.”

“Where'd you learn how to repair roofs?”

“I'm self taught. I'm self-taught on a lot of repair jobs.” Lucretia drives home another nail. “Cycle sixty-five?”

“Oh. Yeah.” Avi sounds sheepish.

Lucretia puts the finishing touches on a shingle and slides off the roof, down the ladder. Her robe is extremely rumpled and a little stained. She grabs the bulwark staff off the ground and puts her hands on her hips. “Was there something you wanted?”

“We had a meeting today,” Leon says.

“Did I miss something important during that meeting?”

“Not really, but it's not like you to miss so many meetings in a row. What's going on?”

“I think I'm getting nostalgic,” Lucretia says, briskly. “Coffee?”

“Uh, no thanks,” Avi says. “We should probably… go.”

Lucretia frowns but doesn't push it. She heads inside and repaints the living room walls. She stares at the one in between the living room and the kitchen for a moment, considering, and then covers it with a mural of a black tree. Streaks of multicolored light interweave between the branches. Tiny white creatures with huge, glowing eyes clamber over the roots.

She almost paints over it when she's done.

 

Weeks pass, and the mural remains. She convinces herself it's a reminder. She convinces herself that she needs one.

 

Lucretia wakes with a start. She's in an unfamiliar room – Did they catch her? She stumbles out of the bed she was lying on, heart pounding in her throat. She's not wearing her IPRE robe.

There's a staff leaning against the wall. She's… She's planetside, she realizes, looking out the window. Wait. This isn't the planet she remembers. She also can't see the starblaster.

She's in a forest clearing on an unfamiliar world and the starblaster is nowhere in sight. She isn't even wearing her robe.

Lucretia takes a moment to get her breathing under control, and the moment passes: oh yeah. Defeating the hunger. Cycle 99. Shit. Fuck. Shitfuck. She laughs hysterically.

They killed the judges. She's so damn glad they killed the judges. She feels trembly, off-kilter, like static. She needs company.

When she's sure she can stand, Lucretia heads to her office to fetch her stone of farspeech, and… who does she want to call? She dials randomly. Taako.

“It's chaboy, whaddaya need?” Comes a dull voice from the other side of the line.

Lucretia is taken aback. Taako sounds bored out of his SKULL. She clears her throat, realizing she hasn't tried to talk yet and she's not sure if she can.

“Taako?” Hoarse. Fuck. He's going to make assumptions.

“Creesh?” There's the good ol' fashioned Taako voice. Lucretia's shoulders lose some of their previous tension.

“Uh, yes, Hi. I uh.” She clears her throat again. “Are you free.”

“Extremely free.” Taako whines. “Whatcha want?”

“Just. Some company would be nice. That's all.”

“I'll be over in a bit, 'kay?”

“All right.”

Taako hangs up. Lucretia sits down. She feels like she's made of mashed potatoes. It's a flimsy and uncomfortable sensation.

It takes Taako an hour to get to her house. Lucretia's mind wanders to the last time Taako was sitting in her kitchen, to Davenport, who had been happy enough in Taako's company and a little less comfortable around her, of course.

Taako's wrath was fast and confused and in-your-face. Davenport's was fiery sometimes, of course, but it was always deliberate, slow as honey, honey that leaves burn scars on your hands when you wipe it away. She can't begrudge him his anger, or his discomfort.

Her mind drifts again. She slides down the couch till she's lying against it.

She thinks back to the shock of the first cycle. All the way back. Despite the fogginess surrounding it, the memory of entering the first new plane is stark in her brain. Sharp like a needle to the chest. She'd had a girlfriend, back on her homeworld. She'd been ready to go away for a few months, of course, because the two of them needed the money. A hundred years had separated her so far from the pain and grief of losing the person she'd considered her other half. She'd met Anya a year before they left. Anya had, before the crew became interwoven and close knit, been the only person to care about Lucretia, the person who gave her comfort when anxiety reared its ugly head and the person who read her works with the most calmly critical eye Lucretia had ever met. No one critiqued her anymore. She was the best abjurer in the world. The best in the planar system.

Anya was also an abjuration wizard. They had met in school. Maybe if she was still around, she could have been the greatest abjurer in existence. Maybe she was still out there, thanks to Jeffandrew. 

Her mind turns to Lup, all of a sudden: The taste of Lup's tongue the night they kissed on the deck of the starblaster, the warmth of Lup's hands. The way Lucretia had avoided Lup for a few cycles at the beginning, afraid of chasing her, looking for a replacement for Anya, and the way Lup, who had never had any stable friends besides her brother, had come to her instead. She thinks of how Lup fell in love with Barry instead, and how Lucretia had started avoiding them, because she didn't want to be in their way, didn't want to make it feel like she still wanted Lup to herself. How Taako had mentioned polyamory in elven culture offhandedly one cycle, and how dating loses its appeal when you know your lovers are going to die. Lup wouldn't die. Barry's human. Her head aches, and she lets out a deep breath she'd been paying too much attention to. She remembers writing about Lup in her journals. 

Lucretia drifts.

There's a knock at the door.

She forces herself into a sitting position, and then stands. She heads towards the door. Her hand lingers on the doorknob for a moment. She turns it, pulling the door open.

Taako looks happy, but a little thrown together. He's wearing a pair of sweatpants. She hasn't seen Taako wear sweatpants in decades. (She hasn't seen much of Taako in decades, so she supposes she shouldn't be surprised. He wore sweatpants on the ship, sometimes.) His shirt is too big and it falls down over one of his shoulders, the end of the sleeve pooling around his elbow.

“Good afternoon.” Wow, she's still hoarse as fuck. She clears her throat.

“Hey Lucy, how ya doin?”

Lucretia steps aside to let Taako into her house. “Oh, you know.” She shrugs. “Woke up this morning stuck in cycle 65. Do you have any idea how long it's been since that happened?”

“A century?”

“Just about.”

“That sucks, Creesh. You feeling better?”

“A little. It took a lot less time to realize things were okay this time. The moonbase doesn't lend itself to 'oh yeah, everything's fine' the same way this place does.”

“Did that happen while we were there?”

“Yes.”

“And you didn't say anything?”

“Of course not.” She looks at him. “You didn't know. You wouldn't have known what to do.” She plops back down on the couch and folds her arms in a way that doesn't really look like folding her arms, but rather stacking them on top of each other across her ribs.

“Oh yeah, I guess that's on you, isn't it.” Taako plops down next to her, taking up both the remaining couch seats. “That's your fault.”

“Yes it is.” Lucretia swallows. “How's life?”

“Oh you know. Work is boring me by this point. I just sit around accepting calls. Sometimes I sit in on a class, but. I feel like you, Creesh. I feel like I went and just nabbed the same job as you somewhere else. I'm sure I do less paperwork than you do, but that's _voluntary_.” He groans.

“I could have warned you, if you'd asked.” she says.

“Nah,” He says. “It's fine. I'm still the best wizard ever.”

Lucretia laughs. She pauses, tucking her hands in so her arms are actually folded instead of just kinda hugging herself. “By the way, I know this was like six years ago, but you took one of my favorite robes. I would like it back at some point.”

“Ya know you've got good tastes when the robe Taako from TV runs off with is your fave,” Taako says. He grins. “I'll give it back. Eventually. I'll put it in my will.”

“Taako, please.”

Taako keeps going. “Found any magical whispering rings lately? Do they make you invisible? That might be why you haven't aged.”

Lucretia doesn't have any idea what he's talking about. “No, just the staff.” She tightens her grasp around it. She wouldn't mind letting someone else use it, she considers, but she's not sure how sane she would stay without it. (Not that finding company and comfort from a magical staff is particularly sane, she reminds herself.) “It doesn't have any necromancy or time related powers, I would know.”

Taako shrugs. “You seen lup lately?”

“….No? Why?”

“She mentioned you, and I thought she mighta come over. You know.” He winks.

Lucretia sits up straighter. “Excuse me?? She's _married_.”

“We all know you have a thing for her.”

“ _She's married._ ”

“Are you implying that I'm implying that Barry isn't the chillest man on the planet? He's chill, bubellah. He's chill as _fuck_.”

Lucretia fumes. “I can't believe she told you about that.”

“What? Nah, she didn't tell me shitfuck, Creesh. You did.”

“ _What???_ ”

“Shit, Luce, I didn't wanna get up in all your business but you broadcasted it to the world. Everyone knows. E v e r y o n e.”

“...” Lucretia stares at him.

“Yes, Lucy goosey, everyone knows about that time you kissed Lup in cycle 23. Everyone knows how you pondered why her mouth tasted like ash.” Lucretia's heart jumps into her throat. “Everyone knows how long it took you to realize she had been smoking weed. Everyone knows about the day you asked her to go with her. Everyone knows about that, Luce. Why in all the fucking planar systems did you feed THAT to the voidfish??”

Oh yeah, Duh. 

“We didn't know if she was alive at the time, and, I couldn't have her remembering me.” She slumps back against the couch with a sigh. “Well I guess that's something, isn't it.”

“Yea. Speaking of weed, you want some?” He pulls a pipe out of his bag and waggles it in her direction.

“Were you just trying to figure out how best to offer me Marijuana this whole time?” She bites her lip. "Or is the weed an excuse to try and weasel more information about my love life out of me? Or both? Are you hoping to get me high so that you can grill me about my _past_ relationship with your _sister_??"

“Maaaaaybe.” He lights his pipe.

"You're hopeless." Lucretia sighs. “The real question is, will it give me an anxiety attack? Because I certainly don't want to deal with that right now.”

Taako shrugs, exhaling a cloud of smoke. Lucretia banishes it with a wave of her staff. “Prolly not, but. Ya know. Everyone's different."

Lucretia frowns, thinks for a minute. Leans forward. It couldn't hurt more than it already has, right? She sorta misses smoky evenings with the twins on the ship. She just. Gods. She misses lots of evenings on the ship. _Maybe my joints will hurt less if I do._

“You know what, fine. Give it here.”

It's been over 100 years since Lucretia smoked anything, but she only coughs a little on her first inhale. She hands the pipe back over.

“Atta girl.” Taako grins. He takes another hit and pulls out his stone of farspeech. Lucretia takes the pipe from him again.

“Hey LUP Babe wanna come hang with me and Lucy we're smoking.”

“Holdon-” There's a thud. Lucretia thinks she hears Lup say 'take that, motherfucker,' before she actually replies. “Mind or body?”

“Body. Creesha's had a bad morning.”

“Hah. I'll be over in ten.” The stone clicks off.

Lup shows up with scorch marks on her shirt, a bag of presumably more weed, and two pipes. Lucretia's already feeling somewhat pleasant, but to her surprise she doesn't exactly feel high. There's none of that jittery, paranoid feeling that has always come with being high in the past.

Lup packs up a pipe for Lucretia and hands her a match. “So what was your freakout?”

Lucretia sighs, striking the match on the couch and lighting Lup's pipe. “Just. Old shit. Fuck. Why isn't this making me panic? Is it a different kind of marijuana?”

“Low THC, my friend,” Taako drawls. “Less brainfuck. More relaxing.” He takes another hit and stands up. “Yall want hot chocolate?”

“Fuck yeah, sit down. You're already high.” Lup heads into the kitchen. Lucretia can hear her banging around and finds she doesn't care too much.

“You'll mess it up, though!”

“Don't underestimate the power of Lup.”

Lucretia snorts.

Lup comes back with three wonderfully creamy cups of hot chocolate.

Taako leans his head on Lup's shoulder and grimaces at the first sip of hot chocolate. “I forgot how weird food tastes when you're smoking.”

“I think it's fine,” Lucretia says.

“You eat ramen for breakfast,” Lup reminds her.

“Fuck, you're right.”

“So what've you been up to, gurl?”

“Mmm. Work. Avi and Leon scolded me for fixing my roof. I painted.” She gestures to the hunger tree. Taako frowns.

“Th hell, Lucy.”

“Iunno, it's a reminder, I guess. I needed something to do.” She's sleepy. She realizes that she slept last night, so she shouldn't be so sleepy. But. It feels good. She snuggles up next to Taako as Lup slides herself onto her other side.

Lup catches her hot chocolate before she spills it. “Well I guess someone needs a nap,” she hears, and then she drifts off.

 

Lucretia wakes up to the soft sound of Lup breathing. At some point while she was asleep, her head had landed on Lup's chest. She listens to her heartbeat, slow and strong in her chest.

“Mmm.”

She wiggles closer.

“Afternoon, Creesha. Comfortable?”

“Mmmmmm.”

“That's good.” She moves and Lucretia makes an undignified noise. “Taako, get your ass up and make cha'girl something to eat.”

A muffled no comes from the other side of the couch.

“Come on. You've just been lying there, I know you're not asleep.”

“Fiiiine,” Taako pulls himself to his feet and stretches dramatically. Lucretia wiggles back towards Lup.

As soon as Taako's audibly in the kitchen, Lucretia raises a question.

“Taako said Barry didn't care about us. When we had a thing. On the ship.”

“No, he didn't mind. I thought you did. Otherwise I wouldn't have let us drift apart.”

“Oh.” Lucretia feels very small, and very stupid.

“Why, do you want to--”

“No! No, I.” Lucretia swallows. “I don't know if I can handle a relationship right now.”

“That's fair.”

Lucretia relaxes.

 

_Dear Istus._

_It appears fate has landed me in a good spot, for once. Thank you. I feel so much safer now._

_I don't know how I feel about my romantic life, but slowly people are trusting me more. Maybe time will heal more wounds than I was hoping for._

_I'm still unhappy about my lifespan. Time slips through my fingers like sand. But I suppose if there was something you could do about that, you or the Raven Queen already would have._

_I don't know._

_With love,_

_Lucretia._

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> _I'm placing bets_   
>  _against myself and honestly, I'm a mess._   
>  _with the car engulfed in flame, I am a wreck_   
>  _Things I should have said through call or text._   
>  _I've really been so busy and I regret--_   
>  _CAUSE IF THERE'S NO REST FOR THE WICKED, I'M AS EVIL AS IT GETS!_


	5. Will

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Lucretia considers the Bulwark staff.  
> Taako needs some comfort.  
> Angus's life draws to an end.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Sorry for the late chapter, guys! Finals have been biting my ass, and this one's pretty long.  
> Some taako angst ahead!! also some not-taako angst. But i thought id mention the taako angst

Time passes too fast for a few years and Lucretia finds herself sleeping with her staff again. She teaches it a new lullaby or two. She sobs alone in her office on early mornings when she has nothing better to do.

She writes another letter.

 

_To the Raven Queen._

_Ten years ago Taako said something about immortality and my staff. It can't be my staff, right? I don't want to believe that. I don't want to give up the staff._

_I'm so scared. I want to die before Angus does. Last time he visited, he had  
He was just as wrinkly as I am. It feels wrong. I'm in my . I'm old. Please._

_Should I break it?_

_Lucretia._

 

Lucretia panics when she gets a call from Angus. Usually, he just shows up at her door, towing a dog or carrying a basket full of whatever confections Taako sent her way. She picks up her stone of farspeech and has to take a moment to calm down before she talks.

“Lucretia?” He sounds so _old_.

“H-hello? Is everything okay?”

Angus laughs. “Ma'am, I can't believe I'm saying this, but I think you're going to outlive me. I got a verdict from my cleric and, well, she thinks I have a year left. Tops. I'm 192, I think I'm okay with that. But I thought I'd tell you first. You're practically my mom.”

“Your mom?” Lucretia giggles. (It's not a good giggle. Her chest feels tight and her head is full of fizz and static and her heartbeat is back in her fingers.)

A verdict on what? Is he sick? _He's old, Lucretia. Don't you know what it feels like to be old??_

“Yeah. Will you come visit? I want to see you.”

“Of course,” Lucretia says. “I'll come soon.”

“Thank you. Love you, Lucretia.”

He hangs up.

She immediately does some math – _one hundred, no, two hundred, she's nearly 220 years old, That's too old,_ _that's three human lifespans_ – weaves her fingers into her hair, and shudders apart. She's not ready for this. Whoever is punishing her, whatever is keeping her alive, they're doing a really fucking good job.

Lucretia heaves, leaning over her desk, as the static overwhelms rational thought. She wonders if this is what it feels like to have the Voidfish erase half your memories. She supposes she'll never know. She feels like her lungs are five sizes too small, like her skin is trying to escape from the limits her body sets it to, like everything is too sharp and too dull at once. Time lurches around her.

It takes her an hour to pull herself back together. She feels dizzy and foggy and frazzled. She gets up and wanders aimlessly around the house, stopping in front of her still-painted mural of the Hunger. The paint is starting to wear thin after fifty years. She finds her painting supplies in a back closet, planning to fix it, but instead she just paints the word ' _Dissatisfaction_ ' along the bottom in gray lettering and goes in search of Pan's infinite wine mug.

It's sitting in a back corner of a back closet. Fortunately, it's not on its side, though she chooses to dump the wine still sitting in it out in the sink and rinse off the rim before taking a sip. It's as delicious as she remembers it being.

She learns the hard way that it's much easier to get drunk when one hasn't drunk in a long time.

Taako calls her next.

She picks up.

“Lucy?”

“Hey Taakles. Taako. The seventh relic really was love all along. She loves me. It's GAAAYYY.”

“Lucy are you drunk? Please tell me you're drunk, because any other explanation for this is a bad one. Well okay. Maybe you're high. Cha'boy can get behind that.”

“Mhm.” She giggles. “Don't worry, I deserve. Fuck. I don't know what I deserve.” She stops, zones out for a minute. When she tunes back into reality Taako is in the middle of a sentence.

“...need me to come over there?”

“Taako, Taako please I'm okay, I needed this, I'll be fine--” She hiccups. “Just. You've done too much. I'm visiting Ango tomorrow. I should. I should sleep.”

“Hey creesh?”

“Yeh?”

“Drink some water.”

“Okay.”

She stumbles towards the kitchen, drinks some water, and smooches her staff. It giggles at her. She's forgotten what she was so worried about. Oh well. She'll remember in the morning, if it's important.

 

When she wakes up the next morning she's aware of a few things: She's got a terrible hangover, and the Bulwark staff is definitely a bad influence. She rolls over and drops it onto the floor, staring at it. It hums, flickering and glowing. She stares at the orb of blue gemstone at the top of the staff for a moment, mesmerized, then forces herself to get up and leave it on the livingroom floor.

Three cups of coffee and half a short novel later, Lucretia has worked up the courage to visit Angus. She fills a thermos with more coffee, puts together a small travel bag, and, after a moment of thought, chooses to stick her old wand in her waistband instead of taking the bulwark staff. It feels like leaving behind a pet dog.

Just like every time she sees Angus, Lucretia's first thought is still how much he looks like her and Lup. His curls are looser than Lucretia's, but no less blonde, his eyes a dark amber. His face looks like Lup's, but his nose is flatter. And then he has those weird half-elf ears that don't quite flip around the way elf ears do but aren't nearly as small and unobtrusive as human ears.

The similarities are rather startling, all things considered. Genetics are fascinating.

He's so much slower than her, though, now, so much older. Something in her chest stings, deep and permanent.

“Hello, Lucretia,” Angus says, stepping out of the way of his door to let her in. “No staff?”

“I decided to leave it at home,” Lucretia says.

Angus gives her a concerned look. He doesn't ask any more questions, though.

“Coffee?”

“Ah, sure.”

Angus messes around in the kitchen and comes back out with two cups of coffee. (His hands tremble. He has a slight limp. Lucretia wonders what else she hasn't noticed, and feels guilty.)

“So how have you been?”

“Oh, fine, busy, you know how it gets--” a muffled noise comes from her bag. “Hold on a moment.” She digs out her stone of farspeech. “Hello? Yes?”

“Creesh? Lucretia? Oh good, hey uh, can I ask a favor?” It's Taako. There's a worrying waver to his voice.

“Of course, I'm kinda in the middle of something, but--”

“S'okay, no sweat, just. Pop on over to my place. Like. When you get a chance.”

“I will, I'll get back to you soon, okay?”

“Yeah.” His voice cracks. “Thanks.” He hangs up.

“Well that was worrying,” Lucretia says. “I don't know why he wouldn't have called you, actually. Or Kravitz. Goodness.”

“Maybe he really wants to see you,” Angus says, sipping his coffee. He lowers his cup and purses his lips. “No, you're right. That wasn't Taako's happy voice. Maybe you should see if he's okay… I'm. I'll be fine, just. Don't be a stranger, okay? I miss you.”

Lucretia shakes herself out of a fugue and nods. She gets up. “I'll be back.” She pauses. “We have a year, right? Just- Just like old times.”

Angus smiles, but it doesn't reach his eyes. “Sure.”

 

It takes a lot longer to get to Taako's place than it took to get to Angus's, mostly because she's running low on spell slots.

Taako's baking macaroons. There's already a pan in the oven, which is a bad sign. He's been baking macaroons for a while. Taako bakes macaroons when something feels wrong and he's not sure how to handle it – they were practically his signature dish on the moon base. Granted, his macaroons are very good, but they're his comfort food, the thing he turns to when he's trying very hard not to think.

“Taako?”

“Lu!!” He turns around, whisking something in a big bowl, and grins. Lucretia realizes instantly that he's wearing a powerful glamour, because his face looks vibrant and healthy but his smile looks wan and tired. (also his makeup crinkles wrong, like pieces of tissue paper soaked in water instead of like skin.)

“How are you?” Lucretia steps into the door and shuts it behind her. Taako's apartment is fairly small, considering what he can probably afford. His couch is extremely well worn, and there are only two doors- bedroom, bathroom. It's quaint, and it gives off a very elvish vibe, in that it's so well lived in it feels older than she does. (and Lucretia feels very, very old, so that's rather incredible.) She's pretty sure he's had this same place since he moved off the moonbase.

“Oh, ya know. I was feeling kinda shitty, wanted some company, and then started making macaroons. Feeling better now.”

“That's good,” Lucretia says. She knows he's lying. A century on a spaceship full of insomniacs (and Davenport) will do that to you. Not that the elves were exactly insomniacs -- elves just need less sleep than most races. “Do you want me to read you something? I didn't bring anything along, but I can make a rift and fetch some of my old journals… I could fetch number 21, that one's always good.”

“Yeah, good ol' beach year,” Taako says. His ears droop a little. “Yeah. Sorry.”

“Hey, Taako?”

“Yeah, Lucy?”

“You don't have to be sorry. Things aren't great for you right now, and it's okay to ask for help. It's okay to want company, and it's okay to need comfort.”

Taako looks at her with an expression that would look so tired, if he weren't wearing fifty glamours and probably makeup to boot. Then he smiles, and Lucretia's heart aches, because if anything, that's worse.

“Don't worry, I have some of em here,” he says.

“What? You stole my journals??!?”

“Just some of your doubles, I wouldn't take the originals. I'm not that cruel. But they make me feel better so I took some.”

“That's… fair.”

Lucretia helps Taako finish his macaroons, and sits on the couch with him, grabbing a random journal off his shelf with mage hand. It's actually an incredibly comfortable couch, she realizes, when she sits down.

Taako laughs when he sees the cover. “Shit, this is the one with the time that Magnus tried to eat a cast-iron skillet, isn't it?”

“Like a fucking snake,” Lucretia says. The oven timer goes off. Taako bolts up and heads for the kitchen, Lucretia on his heels. He makes a disgusted face as he goes to take the macaroons out of the oven. They look perfect.

“What's wrong?”

“I don't know, they just--”

She crosses her arms, seeing what's going on instantly. “I swear to every possible god in all the existing planar systems if you throw these fucking amazing cookies away I will climb into your trash can and eat every single one of them.”

Taako's eyebrows shoot up. He laughs. “Gods, Lucy, I forgot about your sense of humor.”

“You forgot about my what now?”

He puts the pan down on the stove, still laughing. “Okay, I won't.”

“Good.”

Lucretia reads the story about the time Magnus tried to eat a pan. Taako scootches under her arm and curls into her side, which is a little painful, since they're both made of angles. (Lucretia lost a lot of her weight during her self-imposed exiles, and never really gained it back, and Taako hasn't always been skinny but he's always had a high metabolism, which makes gaining weight easier said than done, especially after it's lost.) She's sure it can't be comfortable to have his shoulder jammed into her ribs like that. She doesn't comment, instead reading a graphic description of Merle sweet-talking some trees. Taako makes gagging noises. She was always _very_ good at adding that spin to Merle's antics when she wrote them down. And even if she wasn't there to see them, she wrote _all_ of them down.

She finishes another story and flips the page, glancing at Taako. He fell asleep, and he seemed comfortable, so she left him there. Now that she looks, though, she can see his face without whatever powerful glamour he had been masking it with, she sees through the smudged foundation and mascara-enhanced tear tracks to his actual complexion. The scars -which have always been visible, she knows about those- seem more garish and noticeable than they were, even the ones from his childhood which were there when she first met him. His eyes are surrounded by deep shadows which point to days of sleepless nights. He has laugh lines, ones she'd never noticed before, and his skin is less colorful and vibrant than she remembers it being, even back during his time working for the BoB, or last time he came to her house and seemed happy and healthy – she realizes he could have been wearing a glamour then, too. She brushes his hair away from his face (it's still as soft as it's always been) and sighs.

Wonderland, wasn't it? She remembers what that feels like, and the way Taako held himself differently coming back. In the moment she had thought, well, Magnus is dead, but Taako had known Magnus wasn't dead. She had never thought about it after the fact, but with a brief consideration to Taako's age and his lifespan, there's not much else it could be.

She's no boy detective, but she's always been very good at putting the pieces together.

He must be _very_ tired.

Lucretia pulls Taako's sleeping form a little closer and sleeps as well, worn out from travel and socialization.

 

She gets home from Taako's place the next day, and calls Angus to tell him his father is _fine, he's been in a rough patch for a while now but he'll be alright_. She puts her wand back on the top shelf and – fuck – remembers the staff, sitting forgotten in the living room. It keens at her, and her chest fills up with anger: what if this thing WAS causing her all this strife? What if it's the reason?

She can't risk it.

Lucretia leaves the staff on the floor and makes herself a cup of coffee. She sits on her couch. She stares at the staff. She finishes her cup of coffee.

She makes a decision.

She takes the bulwark staff in trembling hands, holds it aloft, and brings it down over her knee with as much force as she has within her.

It snaps in half with a terrible, rending noise, exploding outwards, and then – then! For the first time since the century – Lucretia is reminded of how much it hurts to die.

 

She wakes up alone.

She's alive, somehow.

She knows she's alone, she's usually alone. She goes decades without more than incidental company, it's just a fact of her life. But here and now, alone hurts more than she thinks it ever has.

She tries to move and finds her existence wreathed in pain.

The Bulwark staff is sitting broken in front of her.

No wonder it's so quiet.

She lets herself drift.

 

When she reaches consciousness again, sometime later, a young woman with brown hair is leaning over her. Someone she doesn't recognize. Her hands glow, and Lucretia feels a layer of pain wash away.

Her head is in someone's lap. She looks up.

“Well, she's awake,” says the strange cleric. “That was a lot. What the fuck did you guys do?”

Lucretia is staring at Lup's chin when it moves. “Thanks for helping, Harvey, But Lucy doesn't know you and I'm not sure she's gonna wanna discuss this with a stranger in the room.”

It's such a curt statement, Lucretia reaches her hand up and touches Lup's chin just to make sure it's real. She feels so sideways and upside down right now that she wouldn't be surprised if she imagined up a whole Lup  _and_ a whole stranger.

Lup takes her hand and squeezes it. It's a little grounding, and a little affirming, but Lucretia has a tight ball of fear in her chest, sticking to her lungs like glue.

She turns her head to the side and sees Barry leaning over the bulwark staff, the pieces now re-fused. Oh yeah, she broke that. Why is Barry fixing it?

“What...”

“I don't know man, we trusted you to take care of this thing because you had such a strong bond to it, but I guess we shoulda seen this coming? You're fucking frantic lately.” He does something to the staff and glowing dark fog rises from his hands. “This is the fucking light of creation. You don't just snap it in half. Why did you _do_ that?”

Despite the tone in his voice, when Barry looks up he's not angry. He mostly looks worried.

“Taako mentioned something about magical artifacts and long life, and I. Got carried away.”

“Oh Lucretia, the light of creation doesn't preserve things,” Lup says, one thumb rubbing over Lucretia's palm. “You know that.”

“But – well-- the animus bell---”

“My magic is what made that necrotic, Lucretia,” Barry chimes in. “The Bulwark staff contains abjuration magic, not resurrection magic. Besides, necromancy doesn't prolong life in most situations. _Ending_ ones own life is necessary if one wishes to extend it, usually.” He does something to the staff again, and this time it begins to talk again, in Lucretia's head. It murmurs incoherently, and sobs.

“What is it then?” Lucretia gets off the couch and reaches for the staff. Every inch of her aches in the worst way. “Why am I like this?” Touching the staff sends a painful shock through her body. She closes her fingers around it anyway. “I'm sorry, I'm so sorry.”

“Besides,” says Lup, coming over, rubbing little circles into her shoulders, “The light follows the command of its holder. Lucretia is its holder. If the light was controlling her age, she'd be dead by now.”

Lucretia sniffles. "I don't, I don't know, I just thought. Or I didn't think, I suppose, I just went look, a stick, let's break the fucking stick."

Lup laughs. Barry frowns. 

"That's the other thing, Lucretia. Breaking this staff should have killed you. It's a fucking _powerful_ magical artifact. You can't just _break_ it."

"It did feel like dying," Lucretia mumbles. The room dips around her, and Lup's hand relocates to her shoulder. 

Barry makes a frustrated noise. _Scientists_.

"Maybe it's punishment,"

"For what?"

"Hurting you."

"That's frankly, Bullshit, Lucretia," Lup says. "That's bullshit."

 

Angus holds her hand.

She never thought she'd be sitting at her own son's deathbed.

In the past few months, she had spent more time with both Angus and Taako. All of a sudden, it felt important to her to get out and be with those she cared about. She wasn't sure if it was a drive to rely less on the staff, or the fact that Angus was dying, or both, but she'd finally come out of her shell a little.

She doesn't feel right, though, sitting here. Something tugs at the back of her brain, because, well, she should be the one dying. She thinks that perhaps every time she has to do this in the future (because face it, Lucretia, this is happening again) she's going to feel that little bit of _wrong_.

Lucretia takes a deep breath. “Angus?”

“Yes?”

“I love you. I love you lots.”

He smiles. “I love you too, Lucretia.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> _So I didn't show up to your funeral, but I showed up to your house._   
>  _And I didn't move a muscle, I was quiet as a mouse._   
>  _And i swore I saw you in there, but I was looking at myself._
> 
>  
> 
> I drew the mural, btw! [Here. ](http://bluemoonhound.tumblr.com/post/168338961212/guess-i-drew-john-and-his-buddies-didnt-i)


	6. Like birds

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> After living a few, Lucretia understands how short a century really is.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Last chapter! (7 is an epilouge.)  
> Enjoy!!

Lucretia's lying on her bed, eating pistachios, when the Raven Queen herself pays a visit. Her entry sounds the same as Lup's, Barry's or Kravitz's might, but when lucretia scrambles to her feet and opens the door to the living room, she has no sythe – Black smog trails around her in wafts and curls, her hair fading into the curves and wisps around her. She's wearing a long black robe.

“Are you here for my soul?” Lucretia asks. Her chest fills with hope, hands trembling on the Bulwark Staff and the doorframe to her bedroom.

The raven queen's face transforms to a look of pity.

Lucretia takes a step back, heart dropping into her feet.

“Lucretia, you are an incredible human being. I've received several complaints from my top reapers about you, begging them to reap you or put you on their bounty lists. You've prayed to me several times in the past hundred years. You've prayed to Istus. Lucretia, I hate to break it to you, but, in the tapestry of life, even the goddess of fate cannot see your end.”

“What?” Lucretia tugs her robe tighter around her, furrows her eyebrows, and stares at the goddess of death.

She's not sure what she expected. She's not sure if she expected anything. Oh, sorry, we got caught up in paperwork. We didn't see your messages. You're human? Sorry, you looked like an elf. (hah.) Maybe something about wonderland, she thought wonderland might have had an effect in the beginning, but it's been a good hundred years too long for that now, and she's given up on that theory. The staff was always a possibility, but, well. She tried that.

“You certainly don't… I, well. Do I have to repeat myself? Your life doesn't end in the foreseeable future.”

“Okay,” Lucretia says. She shrugs. She can vaguely feel the edges of denial working at her brain, but she doesn't care enough right at this moment to be concerned. “Could you at least knock me out? I can't sleep.”

The raven queen laughs. “No.” She cuts through spacetime again and vanishes into her rift.

Lucretia stands there for a minute, feeling strange.

She sits down on the floor, staff across the ground in front of her. Puts her head back against the doorframe. Stays there a while.

Time passes like leaves roll down the street in fall, sometimes skittering, sometimes flying. She tries to take a breath, and discovers that there's a little ball of discomfort lodged in her throat, itchy and solid, hard to work around. She swallows, but it doesn't go away. In fact, the feeling intensifies, spreading through her limbs and turning them to lead, and she realizes her heart is beating very, very fast. Her hands tremble. She reaches forward and touches the bulwark staff, warm and solid, not quite like a person but – as it has been for centuries – just barely similar enough that she's grounded with the touch.

Her vision is high gloss, white and too real, and it's making her head hurt. She thinks the word _immortal_ a few times, trying it out. It doesn't sit right with her. She puts her head between her knees and the world spins for a little while before she takes a deep, shuddering breath, and the weight lifts from her limbs, and she finds that she is very, _very_ tired.

Lucretia makes herself a cup of coffee and fries some eggs, eating slowly. She showers, ignoring the way the small meal makes her stomach churn. Exhaustion drips from her body like the water droplets raining down from the shower head. She sits in the bathtub and lets the water wash over her as long as she dares.

It feels like a century passes before she has the energy to get up, but when she does, she climbs out, dries off, and brushes her teeth. Pads to her room in her underwear and puts on some sweats. The sweater she pulls out of the drawer is too big for her, just a little, and it has TAAKO written across it in big block letters. She smiles, pulling it over her head anyway. She thinks she might understand Taako now, that all she needed was decades of isolation at a time, time alone and sorry and hungry. She thinks she understands the Taako who boarded the Starblaster with her for the first time, arm in arm with a lady who was his only friend and relative. Before them, she'd been vastly aware of her own mortality. They were both older than she thought she would ever live-- their files said a century and a half, at least. Young for elves, but oh, so _old_ to a twenty-three year old on a trip out of her bubble for the first time since she was fifteen. She was suddenly wrenched from her protective pocket of academia and thrown into another dimension, thankfully, not alone.

After living a few, Lucretia understands how short a century really is.

She lies down on her bed, every bone in her body heavy and sodden with exhaustion. She falls asleep quickly.

 

This time, when Lucretia starts overworking herself, her goal isn't to get rid of the nervous energy coursing through her body – she just wants to be tired. She goes to every party, takes on every request from the bureau, sleeps every other day, sometimes less. Her friends are happy to see her out and about more, but really it's just a distraction. She doesn't want to think about the remaining possibilities here, or possibility? Or possibilities. Liches, or Jeffandrew. But if it was Liches, the Raven queen would know, wouldn't she? She'd have known, and she'd have been angry.

She's slow-dancing around Taako's living room, now, arm in arm with Lup, when she finds herself thinking about Jeffandrew again. It would be a sordid twist of fate if he had complimented her so thoroughly without meaning a word he said. She thinks Lup notices, because she comes up with something to talk about less than a minute down this thought thread.

“So how've ya been doing, Lucretia?”

“Oh you know, fine. Busy.” Lucretia pauses, and then realizes there is a suitably unusual topic to explain her probably unhappy expression for the past five minutes. “Lup?”

“Yea, boo?”

“Can you teach me how to split the fabric between planes? Like you reapers do?”

“I don't think so, I think Boss would get angry – why?”

“I just want to know.” Lucretia sighs. “I can ask her if you'd like me to.”

“She's prolly gonna say no, Creesha.”

“Worth a try,” Lucretia replies.

They sway a little longer. Taako's music box trails off into silence, and they stay in each other's arms.

 

Lucretia pulls open her desk drawer, fetching the celestial mirror, staring into it. Someone's spinning a receiving mirror in circles, making Lucretia dizzy. “Hello? Hello. Can you please stop spinning your mirror, and patch me through to the Raven Queen? Tell her it's Lucretia.”

The mirror stops spinning, and a god she doesn't recognize squints at her. “Alright, mortal, but if she's gonna take you talking isn't gonna convince her--”

“It's nothing like that. Raven queen, please.” She finds that she's put on her Director voice, and wonders if her air of complete control and emotionlessness is putting this stranger off. She raises one eyebrow, and he mutters something, switching the channel.

She hears kissing noises. A little put off, Lucretia decides to just interrupt. “Raven Queen-- Is now a bad time?” She's very very glad she can't see much of the room from this angle.

She hears talking, (a voice she recognizes, but she can't remember from _where_ -) shuffling, and a ruffled looking goddess of death appears in front of the mirror. Her lipstick is smudged and her hair is in her face. “Yes this is a very bad time Lucretia-- What's going on?”

“I just wanted to know if it's permissible for one of your reapers to teach me transplanar travel.”

The raven queen chews her lip for a moment. “I, Well.” She brushes some of her hair out of her face. “Alright, fine. You're not going to be able to _stay_ in other planes, because I do believe magically speaking your body is mortal, but I don't see how it can do any harm.”

“Thank you.” Lucretia smiles. “Have a nice...evening?” The sun is in the sky on this side of the planar system, but she doesn't even know if other planes run on the same schedule. “Sorry for interrupting your thing.”

“It's-- It's alright, next time send a message with one of your friends, first, so I can expect you? That would help a lot.”

“An eye for an eye, Raven, because you came into my living room, unwelcome, and told me I'm not going to die.” Lucretia smiles.

“Fair,” the raven queen returns. “Raven?”

“'The Raven Queen' is a mouthful and you know it.”

She laughs. “Well, anyway. Goodbye.” The raven queen turns around, leaving the mirror.

“See you.” Lucretia slides her end back into her desk.

 

Lup comes to her a few days later, saying that, to her great surprise, the Raven Queen had approached her and given her permission to teach Lucretia interplanar rifts.

“I know,” Lucretia smiles, fetching her staff. “I figure we should start outside? And maybe a bit away from the house-- Gods forbid I cut a tree in half and it lands on my roof, that would take forever to fix.”

“Your roof is like two centuries old, Lucy, you reek of elf-habits by now. It's really funny.” Lup sticks her tongue out at her.

“Well, you did throw a huge thing on my hundredth birthday, am I an honorary elf now?”

“Sure. I wouldn't have called _that_ huge. More like, a minuscule little semi-party?” Lup summons her scythe. “Ready?”

“Fuck yes.”

Lucretia does indeed manage to cut down a few trees before she successfully splits the layers of the planes-- first to the ethereal plane, because that one's easy. She pokes right through the skin of the world and sticks the head of the bulwark staff headlong into it, stumbling a little when it doesn't resist. She drags down, magic seeping through the divide.

Lucretia takes a step back, trembling from exertion, and Lup does a little dance. “Whoop! Whoop!!!! Look at you GOOOOO!!”

Lucretia pants, leaning on her staff. She smiles at Lup.

They head back to the house, taking breaks so Lucretia can catch her breath and lean against a tree. For a living being without the Raven Queen's gifts, splitting rifts in space is difficult and tiring as fuck. She sits on the couch as soon as she's offered the opportunity.

Lup sits down next to her. “Sooooo, why are u doing this, Lucy? You're not gonna pull something stupid, right?”

Lucretia laughs. Of course she's going to do something stupid, but it has nothing to do with this. “Well, many of my friends have taken up residence in the astral plane, first off, and I'd love to visit them sometime. I was hoping death would be the way about that, but, it's completely off the table, now. Just not an option at all. So, next best thing. Ask a reaper for lessons. Besides, I'm running out of interesting spells to mess around with. A girl gets tired of abjuration after a few centuries.”

“That's fair, as long as you don't try to stay in the astral plane. I heard from a refutable source that it's an extremely painful way to die.”

Lucretia licks her lips. “Death's off the table, Lup. It's just not happening. Not in the 'foreseeable future.'” She airquotes.

“Says who?”

“Istus and Raven.”

“Raaaaaven? Did you just call the raven queen 'Raven'?” Lup guffaws. “Okay, hold on, that's serious-- the gods really came to your house and said 'oh hey ur not dying,' girl?”

“Uh- essentially,” Lucretia sighs, feeling heavy. “She more like said, 'even the goddess of fate cant see your death' or something like that.” She forces herself to sit up a little. “Let's… Anyway. I can't wait to see Killian and Carey again. How are they doing?”

“They're doing great! It's a ghost party down there.”

Lucretia laughs, this one breathy and lacking the happiness she had harbored minutes before. Lup senses the change of mood and scootches a little closer, letting Lucretia rest her head against her shoulder. The proximity is good. It's good, even though Lup is a little chilly, because her heart is beating right under her skin and Lucretia can feel it.

“You know,” Lucretia says. “I'm kind of glad I ended up this way at the age I did. Imagine being in your thirties for all of time. Not only would you have to deal with some of the body pain that comes with age, but you ALSO have to deal with menstruation. Thank those shitty liches for menopause or whatever.”

“Lucy, I may know a bit about humans, but I have _no_ idea what you're talking about.”

“You know? Menstruation? Menopause?”

“Those sound like distinctly human terms, Lucy.”

“Well fuck. You lucky-ass elf. How old can elves have children?”

“Mid six-hundreds? Is menopause when you can't have kids anymore or something?”

“Sort of. Male humans don't have to deal with it. Because human reproduction is parasitic and gross. Menopause itself is bullshit, your body has a mini-breakdown and gives up. But I aged right on past that in wonderland. Do not pass go. Do not collect 200 hot flashes.”

“I never would have thought anything about wonderland would come to be _convenient_.”

“Me neither,” Lucretia murmurs. “But times were simpler back then. I almost miss it.”

 

Lucretia spends months practicing her transplanar rifts. Finally, Finally, one dark winter evening, Lucretia manages to make a rift to the ethereal plane big enough to step through, and, in a moment of poor judgement, she does. The world here is the same, but watery, like someone tamped it all over with glamours that shimmer the way Taako's fake makeup folds on the creases of his face. She almost suffocates in the overly magical aura of the place. This is nothing like casting _blink_ , it's much more intense than that.

She looks around. Trees, glittering with colorless power. She realizes she's been here so often that the lack of little pale eyes staring at her, watching her, is almost strange. And then she remembers the Hunger and she steps back out of the rift in a flash and turns around, back against a tree, knees-to-chest because holy fuck the hunger. The energy she had earlier is sapped from her all of a sudden and she's wheezing, they're coming, they're _watching_ her, it's so _cold_ \--

Pull yourself together, woman.

Still trembling, Lucretia sprints back to her house, clutching the bulwark staff to her chest, throwing frightened glances over her shoulder because she can't shake the feeling that someone's following her, something that's been following her for a hundred and twelve years. There's nothing there. _That was years ago. That was over a hundred and fifty years ago._

Dizzy, she forces herself to go through the motions of coming back from a trip late in the day, turning on the lights, taking off her boots (she keeps messing up, the laces not coming undone in her trembling fingers), taking off her cloak and hanging it on the coat rack, making herself a cup of hot cocoa (she scalds her hands), sitting down on the couch. She has to put the hot cocoa down and finally she lets herself curl up in a ball on one end of the couch, her back pressed into the back cushion, and just breathe. It feels like hours. _The hunger is gone, Lucretia. It's gone. You're going to be able to do this, right? We can still make a rift, right? Visit the astral plane, the celestial plane? Lucretia, it's going to be okay._

It's going to be fine, right?

 

The next time she makes a rift, she goes straight for the Astral plane. She's done thinking about the ethereal plane, done looking at it, done considering it. To her great surprise, she has no trouble slicing through the sapphire layers of magic separating the two worlds. However, she has no sense of aim-- she opens up right into the lake of souls, and when she steps through, she suffocates.

And Lup was right, it _hurts_. The dead are all over her, saying things about alive, about who? Why are they here, who are they, alive, alive, and it feels like a long, powerful screech is rending her brain to pieces. She can't even find her way back out again, she doesn't have the energy to make a new rift, so she just lets everything overcome her, almost blacking out from the intensity of noise and touch.

Something- someone solid, someone real- grabs her arm, pulls her up, and then she's back in her living room, her heartbeat pounding in her fingertips. She falls to the floor.

The floor is nice. It feels like something. She wants to be touching the floor. She wants to sink into the floor because the floor is real and there and solid and she hurts but the floor doesn't hurt to touch so she moves a bit (ow) so she can be touching as much of the floor as possible, and it's good.

“That was a really bad idea, now wasn't it.”

Oh shit, that's Kravitz. She can't respond. She wants to explain, but she feels fuzzy on the edges and gross and she thinks she might be fading a little. Does she need a cleric? Is it even possible to kill Lucretia the Abjurer at this point in time? She's not sure.

“Were you trying to get yourself killed? I mean, from what I know I wouldn't put it past you, but, that was really stupid.”

She breathes. It sounds labored.

“Shit, I understand wanting to die after being forced alive for an extra hundred and fifty years, but that's the worst way to go about it.”

“Mnngh.”

There's a cold hand on her back, and then it's gone. “Madam-- Lucretia?”

The sound of his voice is getting fuzzy in her ears. Somewhere, someone curses. There's a tearing noise, again, and more voices. She lets the voices wash over her.

Things happen, she realizes. She's not sure what things, though. She moves, at some point. Maybe she doesn't. Maybe she's imagining the things.

She wakes up sometime later, in bed, a couple of warm elves wrapped around her. She still aches, but she's feeling less disgusting.

She reaches out and pulls an elf closer to her, arms wrapped around their midriff. An ear flicks against her cheek. She can feel them smiling. “Tolja, Lucy. Bad way to go.” Lup. Taako, behind her, makes a disgruntled noise.

“I just wanted to visit my friends,” Lucretia says. Thank the gods, her voice isn't raspy.

“You opened a portal into the _lake of souls_ ,” Lup says. “Couldn't you have picked, like, a nice island to manifest on? Somewhere you wouldn't have taken the mental damage of a thousand frightened dead people?”

“Frightened?”

“There's a reason why the dead and the living don't coexist, Lucretia. It's, well, it just doesn't work out, my pal.”

“I don't have aim, Lup. I just opened a rift where I could, and the lake of souls is approximately… ninety fucking percent of the astral plane? I'm not good enough at this rift bullshit for that.”

“Guess I'm gonna have to teach you aim, then.” Lup laughs.

“Guess you're gonna.”

“Get a room,” Taako mutters. He wraps his arms around Lucretia's torso anyway, his cheek pressed against her shoulder blades, soft and warm.

“Excuse me, Taako, this is my _bedroom_. And I don't see how lessons on the creation of interplanar rifts is the slightest bit romantic.”

“Shuddup I'm tryina sleep here.”

“Elves,” Lup mutters. Lucretia can't stop herself from laughing. It feels so good.

 

The raven queen visits her again, a few days later. This time, she knocks on the door.

Lucretia appreciates that.

“Hello?”

“Hello,” Raven says. She inhales. “How are you?”

“Fine, mostly,” Lucretia says. She steps aside. “Come in. It's chilly out there.”

Raven nods. Lucretia supposes that cold probably doesn't bother the Raven Queen, but it's polite.

“Hot chocolate?”

“Actually, I wouldn't mind some coffee, I know it's late...”

“Time is meaningless. Coffee it is.” Lucretia leaves the room to make coffee. She pokes her head back into the living room for a moment. “Oh yeah, you can sit if you want.”

She comes back in with two steaming mugs of coffee. Raven's sitting in her armchair, staring at the crackling fire. She accepts the cup of coffee. Lucretia sits down on the couch.

“So what brings you to my place?” Lucretia asks.

“Oh, I just wanted to stop in. I'm sure you've had time to adjust to what I've told you.”

“Enough, I think. I had a century to consider the possibility, before you confirmed it.”

“True.”

They sit in silence, sipping their coffee.

“I also have an invitation.”

“Oh?”

“Yes. You should come visit us.”

“In the celestial plane?”

Raven nods. “Pan and Istus want to see you again. I think you'll like it there, it's regal and homey at the same time.”

“Interesting combination. I'll think about it.” Lucretia sips her coffee, and realizes who Raven was macking on in the mirror. “Wait-- Are you dating istus???”

Raven blushes. Its weird and off color and at the same time adorable. She purposefully drinks more coffee, maybe a little more than a mortal could swallow.

“Alright.”

“You're also welcome to stop by the astral plane. Merle's been asking after you. I don't know how many times I can tell the damn dwarf you're fine before I have to cave and just bring you over there.”

“Hah, that's Merle for you.”

Raven shrugs. “And I'm sorry I don't have more answers for you about your lifespan. I don't know what's up with that.”

“I think I do. It was probably Jeffandrew.”

“Who?”

“Jeffand-- oh nevermind, you don't know him. Don't worry about it.”

“Okay, that's… okay.”

Lucretia sighs. Maybe things will be alright, after all.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> _so will you show up to my funeral?_   
>  _Will you be wearing white or black?_   
>  _And I know the force within you is the energy I lack_   
>  _So if there's a race to heaven, I will surely come in last._   
>  _And if there's a race to heaven, I will always come in last._
> 
>  
> 
> Thanks for reading!


	7. Epilouge: Guardian

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> There's something _right_ about this.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Man, I'm pretty excited about this one! Thanks so much for reading, once again!  
> \-- Oh yeah- and suicide is mentioned in this chapter, but it's not related to a character who even appears in the story.

“Lup.”

“That's my name!”  
“Does this make me a god?”

“Sorry?”

Lucretia slumps across the couch, one hand dangling towards the floor. She's not thinking about much of anything. (She's wearing Lup's ripped jeans-- the ones she had been wearing the first time they kissed. It was comfortable. It was good. She'd taken them out of Lup's drawer and slid into them, and they're far too big, but she put them on anyway.) She's donned one of her old Director robes for the first time in a century or so. The sleeve rubs across the carpet.

“Well. Let's see here. I'm a highly powerful arcanist, declared to be the most powerful by someone who seems to be, well, in control of the known multiplanar system? And I'm immortal. Maybe not by definition. You can touch me.”

“What would you even be the goddess of?”

Lucretia shrugs. “False moons?”  
Lup laughs. “Bogus.” She plops herself down in front of the couch and puts her head on Lucretia's belly. Her hair is soft, like Taako's. They might even be _related_ or something. “Don't talk yourself down like that, babe.”

She sighs. Lup's super important to her, and she tries so hard, but sooner or later everyone and everything will be gone and Lucretia will still be standing. She suddenly, desperately needs a hug.

Lucretia pushes Lup's head off her and sits up, whiting out for a second when she moves too fast. She slips onto the floor and wraps her arms around Lup as tightly as she can, head on her boob. Her shirt smells like wintergreen and that strange, distinct scent (kind of like petrichor) that the Astral plane leaves on everyone who visits it.

Lup runs a hand through her hair, soothing. Lucretia sits there for a moment, curled into her side.

Time passes in quiet breaths. This time, she doesn't cry. She doesn't freeze up or break down. It's getting better-- She'll be alright.

“I'm not going anywhere, okay?”

“You're not immortal,” Lucretia sighs.

“Yes I am, Lucy, I'm a lich-reaper. I've got both on my plate. TWO whole immortality schticks to fall back on.”

“Taako--”

“He mentioned joining our little crew, once. But also, if he dies, and goes to the Astral plane, you can still visit him. Lucy, you can visit any of them. They're still _there_.”

Another pause, quiet and delicate.

“Guardian of the prime material plane,” Lup murmurs.

“What?”

“The goddess Lucretia, guardian of the prime material plane,” Lup clarifies. “Lucretia. It's an interesting name. In myth, Lucretia committed suicide in an act of defiance. It seems like you've done the opposite – resigned yourself to immortality in an act of humility.”

“That's not – there's so much more to that myth, Lup.”

“I know.”

 

Lucretia recieves a letter in a golden envelope, one day, and sits down on her couch with it. It looks like real gold. She runs her fingers over it, wondering who could possibly be rich enough to make something like this – and who would care enough about her to send it to her. (And how they managed to send it without it getting stolen.)

She gives up this train of thought and digs her nail under the flap and pulls the envelope open. Inside is a sheet of paper, most definitely embellished with real gold, with an invitation:

 

[Lucretia:

The Raven Queen (and pan!) and I Cordially invite you to “come hang out and have a beer” in the celestial plane. Write your answer below. We'll get it.

 

Yours,  
Istus, Goddess of fate]

 

Lucretia frowns. Alright, then. She picks a pen up off the desk and writes “I'll be there. But where should we meet? What time? What day?”

Immediately, Pan's handwriting appears.

“Oh shit, we didn't give you a time? Can you do today at 10 PM? (Your hours.) At. Uh.” He writes an address. “Goddess Bar and Casino.” Alright then, Lucretia thinks again. A Casino?

“I can work with that.”

A third handwriting appears. It looks like it came out of a typewriter and smells like the Astral plane. “We'll see you there.”

Lucretia puts the invitation down on her side table and makes herself a cup of the strongest coffee she owns. She has no idea what type of night this is going to be, but she knows it's going to be one _hell_ of whatever it is.

 

Lucretia arrives at the Goddess Bar and Casino at 10 PM sharp in her most flattering party dress (she has few of these.) It's blue, and ruffled, with a low neckline and baggy sleeves. It's the kind of dress Taako would wear. She wonders, for a moment, if it's actually Taako's dress-- she wouldn't be all that surprised. She's also wearing the off-white heels Lup got her in cycle 63, the exact same shade as her hair.

Istus, Pan, (Merle??) and Raven are already there, sitting at the bar. Merle waves her over with his wooden hand. (It shocks her a little that he didn't decide to manifest his normal hand after death, but she supposes that dating the god of plants and shit aided in that decision.) She sits down next to him and orders the 'biggest cup of wine possible'. The bartender, a blonde lady she doesn't recognize wearing a crop top and a miniskirt, gives her a huge grin. “Right away, darling.”

Lucretia blushes a little, and turns to Merle. “So how've you been?”

“Oh, fine, you know. Dead.”

“Sounds chill.”

Pan grins and leans forward, around his boyfriend. “Lucretia! How's immortality treating you?”

Lucretia laughs. “Oh, terribly, you know how it is. I certainly didn't plan on living this long, unlike you.”

Istus sips some wine. “you'd be surprised. Not all gods planned to be immortal.”

“Are you implying that you were mortal at some point?”

“Who wasn't?”

“Are you implying that I'm a god?”

“We don't know _what_ you are, Creesha,” Raven says. She sounds smashed. She's drinking what looks like a gallon of gin. Lucretia can't blame her.

“How long have you guys been here?” Lucretia asks.

“Not long,” says Merle, at the same time that Istus says “A while.”

They talk for a while-- she reminisces with Merle, mentions her conversation with Lup (“Not all powerful immortal beings are _gods_ , honey!” Shouts a very drunk Raven. “What are _reapers_?”) and finally, when Pan and Merle start snogging, slides out of her chair to play pool with the lady from the bar-- who says her name is Eli, thank ya very much, the owner of this _fine_ establishment. A dark haired older woman takes over her place at the bar while they head towards the pool table, absolutely destroying the other team, thanks to the experience Lucretia gained from Taako and Lup during the century combined with Eli's uncanny prowess. It's-- well, it's sure as fuck an _evening_ , and by the time Lucretia heads back to the Prime Material Plane she's so drunk that she tears a portal a full mile from her house and has to walk.

She finds the invitation and flips it over, scribbling 'thanks for eviting me had a great time!' on the back and then wandering towards the kitchen for a _lot_ of water. Who'da thunk gods can get rip-roaring drunk? Well, Pan was there, she considers. He's _B_ _acchus_ , after all.

That night, she has the best sleep of her whole long life and -somehow- wakes up feeling completely refreshed.

 

The last mission for the Bureau of Benevolence leads Lucretia to a cave. It's been exactly 300 years since the day of Story and Song-- Taako's middle aged now, and she's become close friends with the gods who were with her and her friends during their time saving this world.

It's a deep cavern, but Lucretia is spry for a person inhabiting a 58-year-old body, and climbing proves to be less difficult than it could have been. She has to break a few times, joints creaking, but she gets back up and keeps going. She's not sure who she'll find down here, just knows that they've taken her notebook, and it's time to get it back. (time to copy it, because they were getting old. She realized one was missing.)

When she finally reaches the room her signal is pointing her towards (she imbibes her books with tracking spells, so if they get lost they can be found easily) there's a single light coming from the entrance. She quickly turns off her own light, creeping towards the entrance. Her book is right in the middle of the room, a man sitting cross-legged behind it, looking like he's praying?

She feels a strange pull, a tugging at her chest.

She steps forward. He seems harmless enough.

The man looks up, noticing her presence, and scrambles backwards. “Who--”

“I just want my book back,” Lucretia says.

“Your-- I thought the author of this book was _dead_! They _have_ to be! It's _centuries_ old!!” He takes a breath. “You- you're _human_!”

“No, yes, and yes. I'm human, I am not mortal.” She picks the book up off the floor. “Cycle 65, huh? That one was a doozy. I'm glad we finally defeated the judges, in the end.” She sends the book back to her house. No reason to keep it there, in a cave, in the condition it was in. “What did you want with it, anyway?”

“It's _fascinating_. Right out of the legends of story and song, told in first person. It's too bad Taako is the only remaining of the seven birds, I would have loved to meet her.” He takes a breath. “Are you a god?”

“I don't know. And I hate to break it to you, kid, but I am Lucretia.” She pulls her staff a little closer.

“You're – what?”

“The bureau is finally closing. This was my last mission. Avi retired, recently. I-- well. It's time to move on, don't you think?” She offers him a hand.

“What?” He takes the hand anyway, shuddering like her touch is painful. She thinks she understands why – she's overflowing with magical energy.

“Come on, let's get out of this fucking cave,” Lucretia says. She transports them easily, but the human behind her looks shaken nonetheless. (It's easiest to transport when you can picture where you're going in your mind, or she would have used that power to _enter_ the cave, as well. As it was, she needed the exercise.)

He lets go of her hand as quickly as he can. “You _are_ a god, aren't you.”

she starts walking, because she doesn't really know if she wants to keep talking to this complete stranger about the state of her mortality.

“Just a guardian, for now,” She says. Something tugs in her chest.

 

When she gets back to the house, she takes off her bracer. Rubs the skin where it was. It wasn't like she hadn't taken it off over the years, but it'd always been there, sometimes, as a reminder. Now it's off. Permanently. She seals it closed.

Rewriting cycle 65 doesn't hurt so much this time. It hurts a little, but it's a phantom pain. Like when a scar hurts, even months after it's healed over. She sighs, finished, putting it on the shelf with the others.

 _I made it through all of this_ , she thinks, _And I'm going to keep on going_.

She calls Lup on her stone of Farspeech and talks about her day. She gets undressed, takes a shower, eats dinner, goes to bed. Puts her staff against the wall. She needs to replace the siding, again. Taako's visiting on Saturday.

This- Whatever this is – this feels right.

 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Man-- when I first started writing this, it was gonna be an 8-10,000 word one-shot. That sure changed!  
> I'm really happy with it, though. I'm glad I changed my mind and gave it a happy ending. I'm glad I wrote it at all.  
> I've gotten so much positive feedback from this, too! I'm astonished. Just. Thank you so much.  
> (Eli is a character from [my webcomic](http://www.thethirteengoddesses.tumblr.com) if you were curious.)
> 
> I'm also hoping to write some one-shots based on background scenes in this story. If you've got ideas/questions, just put em in the comments!

**Author's Note:**

> title and lowkey story inspiration: No Halo by Sorority Noise (song)
> 
>  
> 
> _And If there's no rest for the wicked I'm as evil as it gets!_


End file.
